June 1, 2025
I’ve always loved words—not just their sounds, but their roots, their shapes, their hidden histories. There’s something deeply satisfying about tracing a word back through time, watching it shift and evolve, like a river carving its way through centuries of soil. Etymology, for me, isn’t just trivia—it’s time travel.
Take the word “inspire,” for example. It comes from the Latin inspirare—to breathe into. Somewhere along the way, someone imagined that creativity or courage or divine insight could be breathed into us, like wind filling sails. And here we are, still using it, often without thinking twice. But when I do stop and think… it hits me that I’m carrying forward the echo of someone’s imagination from over a thousand years ago. That’s not just poetic—it’s a kind of quiet magic.
This, to me, is a perfect example of Persistence—not just survival, but continuation with meaning. In the language of Contours of Tomorrow, it’s the idea that some things last not because they resist change, but because they flow through it, adapt to it, and find new voices to speak through. An idea can outlive its originator by centuries. A thought, smuggled into the future by symbols on a page, can find a new home in a mind far removed from the one that first gave it shape. When I read, I’m not just decoding sentences—I’m participating in a long, unbroken act of communion.
That’s part of why books hold such power for me. In the act of reading, I’m quite literally thinking someone else’s thoughts. And sometimes—if the book is old enough—those thoughts have survived wars, fires, censorship, and neglect, passed down across hands and hearts for generations. It’s astonishing, really. These pages contain the persistence of human intention, curiosity, and insight. Even the mundane stuff—cookbooks, shipping logs, cracker box labels—they’re all little vessels of intention, however humble. Someone somewhere decided: this should be written down. Someone should know this.
Of course, not every word carries thunder. Sometimes it’s just “riboflavin” on a box of Wheat Thins (they’re not crackers, but I’ll leave that topic for another day). But even then, there’s a faint flicker of that same spark—information chosen, recorded, shared. It’s a small, everyday miracle that language still works at all, and even more miraculous when it manages to carry something deeper: a feeling, a memory, a worldview.
And then there are the writers whose words do more than inform—they delight. For me, Douglas Adams falls squarely into that category. His particular turn of phrase seems to tickle some specific corner of my brain. I’ll find myself pausing in the middle of a page, smiling, then flipping back to reread a line or two—not for comprehension, but for the sheer joy of it. There’s something about the way he dances through language that makes even absurdity feel precise. It’s like watching someone juggle lightning.
And so I keep reading. Keep tracing the threads. Because every once in a while, a phrase will hit me just right, and I’ll feel it—that electric moment where I’m not just reading, I’m receiving. And in that moment, I’m reminded that I’m not alone. That some ideas are far older than I am, and some will outlive me. That by participating—by reading, writing, speaking, and listening—I help keep the long story going.
← Back to Blog List