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The best purchase you have ever made reveals everything about your values. A question-driven reflection on meaningful spending, personal transformation, and the choices that shape who we become.

Rise & Inspire: WordPress Daily Prompt for Intentional Living

What is the Best Purchase You Have Ever Made?

23 July 2026 

SECTION 1: What is the Best Purchase You Have Ever Made?

What makes a purchase truly best?

Not the lowest price. Not the most luxurious item. Not the thing that impressed the most people or delivered the quickest dopamine hit at the checkout line.  When we pause to reflect on what we have genuinely valued most, we often discover that the “best” purchases share something deeper: they addressed a real need we did not know we had, or they arrived at precisely the moment we needed them most.  But here is where most of us stop. We count the material blessing and move on.

What did you sacrifice to afford that purchase?

Every transaction holds a small story of trade-off. Money spent here could not be spent there. Hours worked to pay for it. Perhaps delayed gratification—saying “not yet” to something else to say “yes” to this.  This question reveals something about our values. The purchase you fought for, saved for, or chose despite other temptations—that one tells you who you are. It shows what you truly believe deserves your resources, your time, your sacrifice.

Did that purchase change you, or did it simply change your circumstances?

There is a profound difference. A new coat changes your circumstances—you are warmer. But the best purchases often change the person wearing it. They alter how you see yourself, your relationships, your purpose. They open doors. They solve problems you did not even realize you had. They free you to pursue something greater.

What would you lose if you had to return it?

Sit with this question. Not the financial loss—the personal one. The capability. The memory. The relationship it enabled. The stability it provided. The confidence it gave you. The answer to this question separates the truly valuable purchases from the merely pleasant ones.

My Best Purchase

For me, the answer is a set of books I bought nearly thirty years ago—a comprehensive collection on legislative drafting and constitutional law. I was not wealthy then. I had to choose: use that money for a vacation, an upgrade, the comfort purchase everyone else was making. Instead, I bought books that challenged me, books written by giants in the field, books that would take years to truly understand.  That purchase did not change my bank account immediately. But it changed my trajectory. Those books became my teachers when mentors were scarce. They shaped how I approach problems, how I draft, how I think about law not as rules but as the architecture of human community.  Would I return them for a refund today? Never. They are irreplaceable—not because of their market value, but because of who they made me become.

What This Reveals About Purchase and Value

When we buy something that transforms us, we are not just purchasing a product. We are making an act of faith. We are saying: “I believe in my own growth. I believe this is worth my resources. I believe I deserve to invest in becoming who I am called to be.”  This is why the best purchases often feel counter-cultural. In a consumer world that screams for more, faster, cheaper, the best purchase often asks: What is worth my limited resources? What will serve my highest self? What will I thank myself for years from now?  These questions matter. Because every purchase is a small referendum on what we value. Stack them together, and they become the story of a life.

Reflection Question for You

When you think of your best purchase, which of these questions does it answer? And what might that purchase reveal about who you truly are, and who you are becoming?

 SECTION 2: Purchase as Theological Act: Augustine, Aquinas, and the Ordering of Loves

Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400 CE) frames all human desire within the context of ordering loves: ordo amoris. A purchase represents a micro-expression of our hierarchy of values. When Augustine recounts his theft of pears in Book II—stolen not for hunger but for the sheer pleasure of transgression—he reveals how consumption embodies moral psychology. Today’s “best purchase” question invites the same self-interrogation: What does this purchase reveal about my ordering of loves?  Augustine also developed the foundational doctrine of use and enjoyment (uti and frui) in his On Christian Doctrine. We use material goods rightly when they serve our ultimate end (union with God), and wrongly when we treat them as ends in themselves. Thomas Aquinas further developed Augustine’s distinction between use and enjoyment in the Summa Theologiae, especially in his treatment of enjoyment (fruitio) in the Prima Secundae.

By this standard, the best purchase is not the one that brings the most pleasure, but the one that rightly orders our soul toward transcendent purpose.

The Hedonic Treadmill: Predicted versus Experienced Utility

Behavioral psychology has revealed a paradox central to our understanding of purchase value. The hedonic treadmill—a concept introduced by Brickman and Campbell (1971)—explains how we systematically mispredict what will make us happy. We expected the vacation to transform us; instead, its effects faded quickly. We did not expect the book collection to matter; yet it became foundational to our identity.  Daniel Kahneman’s later work on affective forecasting and the distinction between “experienced utility” and “predicted utility” deepens this insight. There is a profound gap between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does. The “best purchase” narrative often contradicts our ex-ante expectations. This gap—between the material object and the personal narrative we construct around it—is where the real story of meaningful purchases lives.

The Phenomenology of Sacrifice: Marcel on Having and Being

Gabriel Marcel’s existential distinction between having and being (Être et Avoir, 1949) becomes critical here. When we say a purchase changed us, we are describing a movement from quantitative increase—having more—to qualitative transformation—becoming different. The purchase becomes meaningful not through possession alone, but through the sacrifice it required: the narrowing of other paths, the commitment it entailed, the deferral of other desires.  This shifts the locus of purchase meaning from the object to the act of choosing itself. The best purchase is not best because of what it is, but because of what choosing it cost us and what it enabled us to become.

Connective Insight

Across these frameworks—theological, psychological, and phenomenological—the “best purchase” emerges as an act that reveals and reshapes identity. It is not fundamentally about the object but about what the object enables us to become. This is why spiritual traditions emphasize detachment from material goods: not because stuff is evil, but because attachment to the right things (truth, growth, love) should exceed attachment to stuff. Every truly valuable purchase is an answer to the deepest questions: Who am I? Who am I becoming? What deserves my finite time and resources?

SECTION 3: Why This Question Matters for Readers Across All Audiences

For the Christian Reader: This reflection invites spiritual inventory. Jesus asked, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul?” This question whispers the same challenge to everyday choices. Your best purchase reveals what your soul actually values—beneath advertising, beneath social pressure, beneath self-deception.

For the Educated Professional: The scholarly companion connects this to real frameworks you think about—Augustine’s theology of desire, the psychology of affective forecasting, the phenomenology of becoming. Your best purchase becomes a case study in decision-making, value theory, and authentic choice.

For the Seeker of Personal Development: Purchase becomes a lens for self-understanding. What you choose to invest in reveals who you believe you can become. The best purchase is an act of faith in your own future self.

For the Diaspora & Global Community: Across all cultures and geographies, the question of value—what deserves our limited resources—cuts through local differences. A teacher in Kerala and a lawyer in Singapore both face this same fundamental choice.

The Integration

SECTION 1: asks the questions that make you feel seen. SECTION 2:  explains why these questions matter intellectually. Together, SECTION 3 validates both the heart and the mind—the full human experience of living faithfully and thoughtfully in a consumer world.

 Closing Engagement & Newsletter Call-to-Action

What purchase would you never return? Share your story with us in the comments below. Whether it is a book that changed your thinking, an experience that shaped your identity, or an investment that became foundational—we would love to hear what your best purchase reveals about you.  And if this reflection resonated with you, join our community of readers seeking to live with more intention, deeper faith, and authentic purpose.

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Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 23 July 2026

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Word Count:1557

My task was simple: watch the entrance, greet the distinguished guest the moment he arrived, and escort him to the garland and the reserved chair. I had been given no photograph — only a description. What could possibly go wrong?

The Guest of Honour Who Wasn’t

A Comedy of Mistaken Identity — and What It Taught Me About Seeing Others Rightly

 It was an entirely ordinary Saturday, and I had been asked to help at a parish function — one of those large, cheerful gatherings where hundreds of people move through a hall and nobody is quite sure who is in charge of what. My task was simple. A distinguished guest was expected, a man of some standing who had travelled a long way to be with us, and I was to watch the entrance, greet him the moment he arrived, and escort him to the front where a garland and a reserved chair awaited.

I took my post near the door with the seriousness of a man entrusted with a sacred duty. I had been given no photograph, only a description: an elderly gentleman, silver-haired, dignified, likely in a fine jacket, arriving perhaps a little after the hour.

At twenty minutes past, exactly as predicted, he appeared. An elderly gentleman, silver-haired, unmistakably dignified, pausing at the threshold to survey the room with the calm assurance of a man accustomed to being received. My heart leapt. I strode forward, took his hand in both of mine, and welcomed him with all the warmth I could summon.

“Sir, we are so honoured you could come. Please, please, this way — everyone is waiting for you.”

He seemed momentarily surprised, but I attributed this to the modesty of a great man, and pressed on. I led him to the front row. I settled him into the reserved chair. I signalled to the organisers, who came hurrying with the garland, and before he could quite form a sentence, it was around his neck, heavy with marigolds. A small ripple of applause went up from the nearby rows. He smiled, a little uncertainly, and folded his hands.

I stepped back, glowing with the satisfaction of a duty flawlessly performed. The guest of honour had arrived and been received with every courtesy. All was well.

It was perhaps four or five minutes later that I noticed a second elderly gentleman standing at the entrance. Silver-haired. Dignified. In a fine jacket. Looking about the room with the calm assurance of a man accustomed to being received — and, just now, with the faint puzzlement of a man who had expected someone to meet him.

The Truth Unfolds

My stomach performed a slow and terrible somersault. I looked at the man in the entrance. I looked at the man in the reserved chair, contentedly wearing the garland that belonged to another. And the dreadful arithmetic completed itself.

I had garlanded the wrong man.

The gentleman in the chair, it emerged, was a retired schoolteacher who had come simply to enjoy the function and perhaps meet a few old friends. He had arrived, been seized upon by an overenthusiastic young man, addressed as an honoured guest, marched to the front, and crowned with flowers — all before he could get a word in edgewise. Being a gracious soul, and not wishing to cause a scene, he had decided that the safest course was to sit quietly and see how it all played out. “I did wonder,” he told me afterwards, his eyes bright with mischief, “what exactly I had done to deserve it.”

What followed was a flurry of quiet, mortified diplomacy — a second garland hastily found, the true guest of honour received with redoubled warmth, and the schoolteacher gently thanked and given, at his own insistence, a place of honour beside the man he had briefly impersonated. The two of them spent the afternoon in delighted conversation, and by the end were the firmest of friends, united by the absurdity of it all. I have rarely been so embarrassed. I have rarely seen two people laugh so hard.

What the Marigolds Taught Me

I have thought about that afternoon many times since, and the longer I sit with it, the less it feels like mere comedy and the more it feels like instruction.

I had made a very particular kind of mistake. I had been so certain of what I was looking for — silver hair, dignity, a fine jacket, an air of importance — that I fastened my expectation onto the first man who matched the description and stopped truly looking. I did not see the schoolteacher. I saw a checklist, and he happened to fit it. My confidence in my own perception was precisely what blinded me.

And is this not, so often, exactly how we misjudge one another? We approach a person already holding a description — a set of assumptions about what their kind of person is like — and we fasten it onto them before they can speak a word for themselves. We garland some with honour they have not earned and withhold it from others who deserve it far more, all because they did or did not match the picture we carried in. We are forever mistaking the schoolteacher for the dignitary, and the dignitary for a stranger left waiting at the door.

Scripture knows this failing intimately. When the prophet Samuel went to anoint a king from among the sons of Jesse, he took one look at the tall and handsome eldest and thought, surely this is the one. But the Lord corrected him: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature… for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” The king God had chosen was David — the youngest, the overlooked, the one still out in the fields because no one had thought to call him in.

How easily Samuel might have garlanded the wrong son. How easily we all do.

A Closing Reflection

The mercy of my little disaster was that it corrected itself within minutes, and among gracious people who chose to laugh rather than take offence. But it left me with a resolution I have tried, imperfectly, to keep: to hold my first impressions more loosely, to look at people a moment longer before deciding who they are, and to remember that the person in front of me is always more than the description I arrived with.

Every face carries a story I have not yet heard. Every stranger at the door may be the very one I have been sent to welcome — or someone even more worth knowing than the one I expected. The garland of my attention is a precious thing, and I would rather bestow it slowly and truly than fasten it, in my certainty, upon the wrong neck.

For the Lord looks on the heart. And the least I can do, fumbling and short-sighted as I am, is to look a little longer, a little kinder, and a little less sure that I already know what I am seeing.

 And you? What is the funniest misunderstanding you have ever been part of — and did it, like mine, leave you seeing people a little differently afterward? I would love to hear your story in the comments below.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 22 July 2026

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Word Count:1265

What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it?

We rarely feel guilty about the apps that look like work. That is exactly what makes them worth examining. My two heaviest screen-time apps are Jetpack and Notes. Jetpack is where I write and publish the blog daily — and also, one tap later, where I watch each post be received. That short tap is the whole problem: watching is easier than writing. Notes does the gentler version, letting me capture a thought instead of finishing it. In my latest reflection I weigh what each app gives against what it quietly takes, and ask the harder question the numbers will not: is this time building something, or just hovering beside it?

Two Apps, Two Ledgers: My Screen Time on Jetpack and Notes

A weekly reckoning with the two apps that quietly run my day

Every Sunday my phone hands me an invoice I never asked for. It arrives quietly, a small grey notification near the top of the screen: your screen time was up this week. Not congratulations. Not well done. Just a number, sitting there with the patient neutrality of an accountant who has already seen the books and is waiting for me to catch up.

This week, as most weeks, the number belonged to two apps above all others. Not the ones people usually confess to — not the endless entertainment feeds. Mine are quieter, and in a way that makes them harder to examine honestly, because both wear the respectable clothing of work. The first is Jetpack, the app through which I write, publish, and then watch over the blog I have put out every single day for more than a thousand days. The second is Notes, where almost every idea I have first lands before it becomes anything at all.

The obvious question the report wants me to ask is how do I cut these down. But I have learned not to trust the obvious question. So instead of a diet, I did what my years of drafting have always taught me to do with any difficult matter: open two columns and enter everything honestly on both sides. What each app gives me. And what it quietly takes. One ledger for Jetpack, one for Notes, and only then a look at the combined balance.

The First Ledger: Jetpack

Jetpack is where the blog actually happens. It is the app in which I write the posts, shape and schedule them, and press publish — the very tool that has carried a thousand-day discipline without a single break. But it is also where the discipline becomes a scoreboard the moment the post is out: the visitor graph, the subscriber count, the comments waiting for a reply, the small green upward line that tells me whether yesterday’s words found their readers. The same app that helps me do the work also invites me, endlessly, to stand back and watch it.

The Second Ledger: Notes

Notes is the opposite kind of companion. Nothing performs there; no one is watching; there is no graph to refresh. It is the first place a Wake-Up Call reflection begins, the place a stray legal phrasing gets caught before it escapes, the drawer where half-formed thoughts wait to be made whole. And yet it, too, claims hours I would not always defend.

Reading the Combined Balance

Here is where the exercise turns on me. Read only the left columns, and both apps look like faithful servants — one where the writing is made and sent, the other where the thinking is caught and kept. Read only the right, and a subtler pattern appears that neither app would admit to alone: each holds the real work in one hand and a convincing substitute for it in the other.

The strange thing about Jetpack is that the trap lives inside the very same app as the work. The screen on which I write the post is one tap from the screen on which I watch it be received — and watching is so much easier than writing that the tap is almost always inward, toward the graph. Notes runs the quieter version of the same trick: it lets me capture the thinking instead of finishing the thinking. Each app keeps a substitute for the work close beside the work itself — and that small, frictionless step across is exactly where the hours go. The gains in both left columns are real. But the costs in both right columns are drawn from the same irreplaceable account — the hours in which I might simply have written, and did not.

So — Do I Feel Bad?

This is the sharp edge of the prompt, and I want to answer it truthfully rather than piously. The honest answer is: not nearly as much as I would if these were idle apps — and that is precisely the trap. Because both wear the uniform of work, the guilt never arrives. I can lose an hour to Jetpack’s graph or Notes’ endless tidying and call it diligence.

Guilt, at least, is a sign that a conviction is still alive. What I feel instead is the comfortable numbness of a habit dressed as a duty. I did not decide to give these two apps so much of my week; I simply let their respectability excuse them. The absence of guilt here is not innocence. It is a very well-disguised anaesthesia.

And that, I think, is the real finding at the bottom of both pages. The danger was never the obvious time-wasters. It was the two useful apps that let me feel productive while gently keeping me from the one thing — the writing, the finishing — that all the productivity was supposed to serve.

Closing the Books

I am not going to promise a dramatic reform, because ledgers taught me to distrust grand resolutions almost as much as I distrust the obvious question. But I have decided on one small, enforceable entry for next week, and it applies to both apps alike: before I open Jetpack or Notes, a single quiet question — am I about to do the work, or only to hover near it?

Not to shame myself. Just to restore a little friction to two habits that had grown far too smooth, and far too easy to justify. Because the number will arrive again next Sunday, patient as ever. The only thing I can change is whether I meet it as someone who spent the week writing and finishing — or someone who spent it faithfully watching the graph and tidying the notes, and called that enough.

What are the two apps that quietly run your week? And when you look closely, do they hold the real work in one hand and an easy substitute for it in the other — the way mine do?

Screen-Time Audit

A visual companion to the reflection Two Apps, Two Ledgers: My Screen Time on Jetpack and Notes

A note on the figures. The numbers and charts below are illustrative — a realistic weekly profile built to show the patterns the reflection describes, not a record of any one person’s actual device data. They are offered as a template you can hold up against your own two apps. Treat the shapes as true; treat the exact hours as a worked example.

1. The Week at a Glance

Two apps accounted for the bulk of the week’s screen time. Jetpack — where the blog is written, published, and then watched over — ran to roughly fourteen hours; Notes, where ideas first land, to about eight. Together they claimed close to twenty-two hours, a little over three hours a day.

The trend line carries the reflection’s central tension. Jetpack’s daily average (about 2.0 hours) runs well above Notes’ (about 1.1), and Jetpack’s Sunday figure sits roughly 51% above its weekday average — the visible signature of the report arriving and the pull toward the graph taking over.

2. Inside Jetpack: Doing the Work vs Watching It Land

The sharpest finding is not that Jetpack is used a great deal — it is where the work is made, after all — but how the time inside it divides. The app that lets the post be written is one tap from the screen that lets it be watched, and watching steadily wins.

Across the week, only about 40% of Jetpack time (5.7 of 14.1 hours) went to writing and publishing; the remaining 60% (8.4 hours) went to watching how those posts performed. The substitute did not merely accompany the work — it outweighed it, and most heavily on the day the report arrived.

3. Gives vs Takes: The Work and Its Substitute

Laying both apps side by side makes the shared pattern plain. Each holds a productive core in one hand and an easy substitute for it in the other — Jetpack trades writing for watching, Notes trades finishing for capturing and tidying.

Notes is the gentler offender — its split is close to even (about 46% productive), because capturing an idea is itself a small piece of real work. Jetpack tilts further toward the substitute. Taken together, the two apps devote about 9.2 hours to the work and 12.5 to its substitutes — a substitute-to-work ratio of roughly 1.36 to 1. For every hour spent making something, about an hour and twenty minutes was spent hovering near it.

4. Where the Hours Actually Go

A single bar tells the whole story of the week — which slices built something, and which merely felt like building.

5. The Numbers in Full

The complete illustrative week, for reference:

Reading the statistics

● Overall, only about 42% of the two apps’ combined time (9.2 of 21.7 hours) produced genuine output; the majority went to watching and tidying.

● Jetpack is the heavier app and the more lopsided: 60% of its time is stat-watching, concentrated on report day.

● Notes is lighter and more balanced, but still spends more on organising and re-reading than on capturing.

● Scaled across a year, the same weekly pattern would amount to roughly 1,128 hours on the two apps — about 47 full days — of which close to 27 days would be substitute activity rather than work.

The projection is the part worth pausing on. A ratio that looks harmless by the hour — a little watching here, a little tidying there — compounds, across fifty-two weeks, into the better part of a month spent hovering. That is the quiet cost the weekly report never quite spells out.

6. Your Own Screen-Time Audit

The reflection ends with a question, and this is where you answer it with numbers of your own. Open your device’s Screen Time or Digital Wellbeing report, find your two heaviest apps, and fill in the ledger below. For each, ask the same two questions the charts above ask: how much of this time made something, and how much only felt like it?

Then work out your own split. If, like this illustrative week, your substitute time outweighs your productive time, the number itself is not the problem to solve — the ratio is. The aim is not less screen time. It is a heavier left column.

Illustrative data prepared as a companion to Rise & Inspire. Hold the shapes as true; the exact figures are a worked example, not a personal record.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 21 July 2026

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Word Count:2293

The central message is that some books do more than tell a story—they reveal hidden truths about the reader. A meaningful book can uncover desires, questions, and longings we have not yet recognised in ourselves, and, over time, influence the course of our lives. 

The Book That Read Me

On the strange gift of a story that knew where I needed to go before I did

 For most of my life, I believed I was the one doing the reading. You open a book, you take in its words, you turn its pages, and when you are finished you set it down and move on to the next. The book is the object; you are the reader. That is the natural order of things, and I never had cause to question it.

Then one book quietly rearranged that order, and I did not notice it had happened until I was standing in a place I had never meant to visit, feeling as though the story had been waiting there for me the whole time.

I want to tell you about that, because I have come to think it is the truest thing travel has ever taught me. We imagine that a book sends us somewhere. What I learned is stranger and gentler than that. The book did not send me anywhere. It had read me first, and the journey was simply how I caught up to what it already knew.

The book I thought I was reading

It was a slim novel, the kind you pick up without ceremony — Ruskin Bond’s The Room on the Roof, his early, half-remembered story of a restless boy named Rusty breaking loose into the life of a North Indian hill town. I read it the way I read most things then, quickly and with a certain confidence, underlining a line or two, admiring the unforced ease of the prose, moving on. I thought I understood it. I could have told you its plot, its handful of characters, the shape of its longing to be free.

But one thing in it would not leave me alone. It was not a description of a monument or a famous view. It was the way Bond wrote about the hills — the litchi trees heavy after rain, the light moving through the deodars, the crooked little bazaars, the sense of a place that was not scenery at all but a way of being wholly awake to your own life. Something in that lodged itself under my skin and stayed. I did not have words for why. It was not even the most dramatic passage in the book. Yet I found myself returning to it in idle moments, on the walk to work, in the pause before sleep, the way you return to a name you cannot quite remember.

At the time I called this admiration. I told myself I simply liked the writing. It would be years before I understood that the passage had not been describing a place at all. It had been describing a restlessness in me that I had never once admitted was there.

The longing I would not name

Here is the thing about a longing you refuse to look at directly. It does not go away. It waits. It finds ways to make itself felt without ever announcing what it is. For me, it showed up as a low, persistent dissatisfaction I could not trace to any cause — a sense that my life, orderly and full as it was, had left some question unasked.

I was good at not asking for it. I had responsibilities, a settled routine, every reason to stay exactly where I was. And so the question stayed folded away, and the book stayed on the shelf, and the passage kept its quiet hold on me, and I told myself none of it meant anything.

What I did not see — what I could not see — was that the story had already named the thing I was avoiding. It had put words to a hunger I had spent years talking myself out of. The book knew. I was the one who did not.

The going

Why I finally went, I still cannot fully explain. There was no dramatic decision, no single moment of resolve. One season the circumstances simply loosened enough that the journey became possible, and something in me — something older and surer than my reasoning — refused to let the possibility pass. I made my plans almost furtively, as though I might talk myself out of it if I looked too closely at what I was doing.

I told myself I was going to see the hills from the book. That was the story I offered anyone who asked, and it was true enough. But it was the surface of the truth, not its floor.

The travelling itself was unremarkable in the way travelling usually is — the long road up, the tiredness, the small frictions of being somewhere unfamiliar. And then I arrived, and everything I thought I understood turned over.

Standing inside the passage

The hills were not what the book had described. They were messier, more ordinary, more crowded and more themselves. The bazaars were loud with horns and the smell of frying; the famous view was half-lost in afternoon haze; the deodars stood along roads busy with traffic. There were a thousand details Bond had never mentioned and had no reason to. And yet standing there, in the actual thin cool air of it, I did not feel the disappointment I might have expected. I felt something closer to recognition — the odd, disorienting sense of arriving somewhere you have never been and finding it already familiar.

And that was when it came to me, quietly, without drama, the way the largest realisations often do. The book had never really been describing the hills to me at all. It had been describing me to myself. The restlessness I had carried for years, the folded-away question, the hunger I would not name — Bond had put words to every part of it, and the book had pointed me, patiently, toward the one journey that would make me finally look at what I had been avoiding.

I had thought I was chasing a place. I had been answering a summons. And the summons had been issued long before, by a book I believed I had merely read.

What the reversal taught me

I have never read a book quite the same way since. I no longer assume I am the only active party in the exchange. Some stories, I have learned, do their own kind of reading. They study you while you think you are studying them. They notice the longing you are hiding, the question you keep folding away, the door you keep walking past. And if you are fortunate, one of them will do you the great service of pointing you toward the road that leads back to yourself.

The journey did not give me a new place, in the end. It gave me back a part of myself I had misplaced — or, more honestly, a part I had deliberately mislaid because I did not know what to do with it. The book had held onto it for me, safe between its pages, until I was ready to come and collect it.

So when people ask what inspired me to travel, I no longer say Ruskin Bond made me want to see the hills. That is not what happened. A book read me more truly than I had read myself, and travel was simply how I finally caught up to what it already knew. Bond, who fell in love with those hills as a boy and then chose to spend his whole life among them, understood something I only learned on the road: that a place can awaken a thing in you and then never quite let it sleep again. I went looking for a landscape. What I found was a mirror — and the long way home to the person standing in front of it.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 20 July 2026

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Word Count:1389

We all keep a private list of things we wish had never caught on. But to erase a trend from history is not to correct a mistake — it is to pretend it never happened. And a people who have never made a mistake have also never learned anything from one.

 My reflection today on memory, grace, and the strange mercy of remembering what we would rather forget.

The Trend I Would Not Erase

On the strange mercy of remembering what we would rather forget

The question arrived like a temptation. If I could reach back through history and erase one trend — one fashion of thought, one fever of behaviour that swept through a generation and left its mark — which would I choose to wipe away? For a moment the mind rushes to answer. We each carry a private list of things we wish had never caught on, movements we would gladly unmake if only we held the eraser.

But I have come to distrust that rush. There is something in the very appeal of the question that ought to give a careful mind pause. To erase a trend is not to correct a mistake. It is to pretend the mistake was never made — and a people who have never made a mistake have also never learned anything from one.

The Seduction of the Clean Slate

We are drawn to erasure because it promises innocence. Wipe away the harmful fad, the cruel fashion, the misguided craze, and surely what remains is a purer world. The reasoning feels almost righteous. Yet it rests on an illusion that anyone who has drafted a single correction into a settled text will recognise at once: you cannot remove one clause without disturbing every clause that leaned upon it.

History is not a list of separate items from which we may delete the unwanted entries. It is a fabric. Pull one thread — even an ugly one — and the whole cloth puckers. The excess of one age becomes the caution of the next. The folly we regret today is the very folly that taught our children what to refuse tomorrow. Erase the folly, and you erase the refusal it made possible.

A people who have never made a mistake have also never learned anything from one.

What the Wound Teaches

Consider how we actually grow — as persons, as families, as nations. Not chiefly through our triumphs, which we tend to forget, but through our wounds, which we cannot. The trend that shamed a generation becomes the conscience of the one that follows. The movement that ended in regret writes itself into law, into custom, into the quiet resolve of ordinary people who murmur, never again.

This is why I would erase nothing. Every trend I might wish to unmake — and there are many — did more than harm. It also instructed. It showed a culture the shape of its own capacity for error, and in doing so, gave it the knowledge it needed to choose differently. To remove the harm would be to remove the lesson, and to leave the next generation to learn it all over again, in fresh blood.

And we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.  — Romans 8:28

I do not read that verse as a promise that evil is somehow good. It is not. I read it as a promise that nothing — not even our worst collective follies — falls outside the reach of a mercy that can turn even our failures into instruction. Grace does not require us to forget. It asks us to remember rightly.

Remembering Rightly

There is a difference between being haunted by the past and being instructed by it. To be haunted is to relive the harm without redemption. To be instructed is to carry the memory as a lamp rather than a chain — to look back not in bitterness but in understanding, so that the road ahead is a little better lit.

The trend I would not erase, then, is any of them. I would keep every one. I would keep the record whole — its beauty and its shame together — because it is precisely the whole record that makes wisdom possible. A history with its failures edited out is not a history at all. It is a flattery, and flattery has never yet made anyone wise.

Grace does not require us to forget. It asks us to remember rightly.

So let the eraser stay in the drawer. The past is not ours to unmake, and it is a mercy that it is not. What we are given instead is something harder and far more valuable: the chance to remember what went wrong, to understand why, and to walk forward carrying that hard-won knowledge like a light. That is not a burden. That is grace — the kind that comes wrapped in memory, and asks only that we do not look away.

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Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 19 July 2026

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Word Count:868

Today’s writing prompt asked which outdated technology I miss the most. My hand answered before my mind did, reaching for a fountain pen that is no longer on my desk. And I realised: what I miss is not the pen at all. It is the whole vocabulary of the senses it once taught me — the weight in the hand, the whisper of the nib, the scent of ink, the tooth of the page, the patience of waiting for a line to dry. 

A new reflection on what we traded away for a frictionless world, and the one technology that never goes out of date. Read it on Rise & Inspire.

The Weight of a Word

An Inventory of the Senses, in Memory of the Fountain Pen

There is a question doing the rounds today, gentle and a little wistful: which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why? I could name a dozen. But my hand answered before my mind did. It reached, out of an old habit, for a pen that is no longer on my desk — a fountain pen, capped and heavy, waiting to be uncapped with a small twist and a smaller sound. And I realised that what I miss is not a machine at all. It is a whole vocabulary of the senses that the machine once taught me, and that the smooth glass rectangle in my pocket has quietly taken away.

So let me not argue that things were better. Let me simply take an inventory — sense by sense — of what the fountain pen asked of the body, and what the frictionless world no longer asks at all.

The Weight in the Hand

Begin with the hand, because that is where the pen begins. A fountain pen has heft. It sits in the crook of the fingers with a seriousness that a plastic stick never manages, and that seriousness travels upward: a heavier instrument makes for a slower, more deliberate word. You do not scribble with a good pen. You cannot. Its balance forbids haste. I spent a career drafting statutes, and I learned early that the tools of the hand shape the habits of the mind — that a sentence written slowly is a sentence thought twice. The touchscreen is weightless, and so, too often, is what we write on it. We type faster than we think, and it shows. The pen’s weight was a discipline disguised as an object. I miss the discipline most of all.

The Sound of Thinking

Listen next. There is the click of the cap, and then, once the nib meets the paper, a sound so faint you have to love it to hear it — a soft, dry whisper as the tines glide and the ink lays down. It is the sound of a thought becoming permanent. A keyboard clatters; it is the noise of speed, of many small hammers falling. But the nib does not announce itself. It murmurs. And in the murmur there is a companionship, the private music of a person alone with a page, working something out. The notifications that now punctuate our writing make a different sound entirely — an interruption, never an accompaniment. The pen kept me company. The phone keeps me on call.

The Smell of Permanence

Then the smell — and here the modern world is simply, flatly poor. Ink has a scent: faintly metallic, faintly sweet, a little like rain on warm stone. Uncap a bottle and the memory of every letter you ever wrote rises with it. Paper has a smell too, and the two together are the perfume of correspondence, of the desk, of the slow work of putting oneself into words for another person to read. A screen smells of nothing. It is odourless, and I think that odourlessness is a kind of forgetting. We have made writing clean and quick and scentless, and in doing so we have severed it from the part of memory that lives in the nose — the oldest and most faithful part, the part that does not let go.

The Texture of Effort

Touch the page. Feel it. Good paper has a tooth, a slight resistance that the nib must negotiate, and in that negotiation there is effort — small, but real. You feel the letters being made. You feel the downstroke thicken and the upstroke thin. The frictionless surface of the glass gives back nothing; the finger slides and the letter appears, unearned. But the fountain pen made me a participant in my own words. There was friction, and friction is where meaning gets its grip. I do not think it is an accident that we have grown less patient as our tools have grown smoother. Effort was never the enemy of the good sentence. Effort was its author.

The Taste of Waiting

And last — the closest thing writing has to taste — the taste of waiting. Ink must dry. You cannot rush it, cannot slide your hand across the line until the page permits it, and in that pause, brief as it is, there is a lesson the instant world has abolished: that some things are made, not sent; grown, not generated. The wet ink drying on the page is a small sacrament of patience. Everything now is immediate. We write and it is gone, transmitted before the thought has cooled. But the pen made me wait for my own words to settle, and waiting, I have come to believe, is not delay. It is respect.

What the Inventory Reveals

Take the five together and a strange thing appears. What I miss about the fountain pen is not the pen. It is the way it engaged the whole person — weight, sound, smell, texture, and the patience that stood in for taste — in an act we have since made bodiless. We did not merely change instruments. We traded a sensory ritual for a sterile efficiency, and we called it progress, and in most ways it was. I would not give back the search bar or the sent folder. But something was lost in the exchange that no update will restore: the sense that writing is a thing done with the hands and the breath and the whole attentive self, and not merely with the thumbs.

Perhaps that is why the question moves us. We do not miss the outdated technology. We miss the versions of ourselves who used it — slower, more deliberate, more present. The pen is only the door. What waits behind it is attention, and attention, in the end, is the one technology that never goes out of date. Uncap something today. Write one true sentence by hand, and feel how much of you it asks for.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 18 July 2026

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Word Count:1157

An excuse is our attempt to be innocent without being honest. In decades of legal service, I heard many fine ones; the best I heard lately came from a child, and it was disarming precisely because it hid nothing. This reflection traces the history of excuses from Genesis to the present day. It arrives at a quiet conclusion: the most sophisticated excuse is still weaker than a plain confession met with grace. The truth, offered simply, has always been received more kindly than we fear.

What Was the World’s First Excuse — and Why Do We Still Use It?

From Eden onwards, the story of our excuses — and the grace that outgrows them

Today’s WordPress Daily Writing Prompt asks: “What is the best excuse you have heard lately?” Here is my answer — though to give it honestly, I must begin much further back than lately. I must begin at the very beginning.

 The First Excuse Ever Recorded

Long before the first invoice, the first traffic jam, or the first unfinished homework, there was the first excuse. It was offered in a garden, under questioning, by a man who had just eaten what he was told not to eat.

“The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12)

Notice the craftsmanship. In a single sentence, Adam blames the woman — and, more daringly, blames God Himself for having given her. The woman, in turn, blames the serpent. The serpent, having no one left to blame, says nothing. Humanity’s first recorded conversation after wrongdoing was not a confession. It was an excuse. And every excuse offered since has been, in some way, a footnote to that one.

A Short History of Fine Excuses

Scripture, read with an honest eye, is something of a museum of excuses. Moses, called to speak for God, protests that he is slow of speech and slow of tongue. Aaron, caught beside a golden calf of his own making, offers perhaps the most audacious excuse in the Old Testament: the people gave me gold, I threw it into the fire, “and out came this calf” (Exodus 32:24). Out came this calf — as though the idol had assembled itself while he stood by, astonished.

Centuries later, in one of Our Lord’s parables, invited guests decline a great banquet with excuses so polished they almost sound reasonable: one has bought a field, another five yoke of oxen, a third has just married (Luke 14:18–20). Each excuse is plausible. Each is also a refusal dressed in good manners.

The secular world has added its own classics — the dog that ate the homework, the alarm that failed to ring, the traffic that appeared from nowhere. The costumes change with every generation; the play remains the same. An excuse is our attempt to be innocent without being honest.

The Best Excuse I Have Heard Lately

And now to the prompt itself. The best excuse I have heard lately did not come from a courtroom or a committee room, though my years in the law have given me a rich anthology of both. It came from a small girl in a family gathering, caught with the tin of sweets that had been set aside for visitors.

Asked why she had opened it, she replied, with wide and earnest eyes: “I was only checking whether they were still good.”

The room dissolved into laughter, and her grandmother — the very authority she had offended — gathered her up and gave her one of the sweets anyway. That, I decided on the spot, was the best excuse I had heard in a long while. Not because it was clever, but because it was transparent. A child’s excuse hides nothing; it is a glass door, and everyone can see the truth smiling behind it.

Our adult excuses are more sophisticated, and that is precisely their trouble. We do not say “I was checking the sweets”; we say “I was under pressure,” “the circumstances were exceptional,” “anyone would have done the same.” The engineering is better, but the purpose is unchanged since Eden — to be found innocent without being found honest.

What God Did With the First Excuse

Here is the detail from Eden that I find most moving. God listened to Adam’s excuse and Eve’s excuse, saw through both instantly — and then, before sending them out of the garden, made garments of skin and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). The Judge who was not deceived became the Tailor who covered their shame. Justice was done, but tenderness had the last word.

That grandmother with the tin of sweets was, without knowing it, re-enacting something divine. She saw through the excuse and gave the sweet anyway. Grace does not pretend the excuse is true; grace makes the excuse unnecessary.

This, I believe, is where the prompt quietly deepens. The best excuse is ultimately the one we no longer need to make — because we have discovered that confession is safer than concealment. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9). Eden’s children reached for fig leaves and explanations. Heaven’s children may simply reach for mercy.

 So the next time an excuse rises to my lips — polished, plausible, and almost persuasive — I hope I will remember the little girl and the tin of sweets, the calf that “came out” of the fire, and the two ashamed figures in a garden being clothed by the very hands they had disappointed. The truth, offered plainly, has always been received more kindly than we fear.

What is the best excuse you have heard lately — and did it make you laugh, or did it make you think? I would love to read it in the comments.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 17 July 2026

K.John Britto

Rise & Inspire — where every sunrise brings a new reason to rise, and every word a new reason to hope.

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Word Count:1030