Purging the Premise

There's a move that keeps showing up in places you wouldn't expect to find it together — a Star Trek film, a Star Wars movie, a legal strategy that just passed 24 to 0 in the Hawaii State Senate, and a text thread with my brothers about food allergies, quantum physics, and the Gospel of John.

The move is the same in all of them. It starts with a concept called the permission slip — anything that gives you internal permission to believe something different is possible. And it ends with a question that turns out to be more powerful than any answer: what is this pointing at?

This episode works through the Kobayashi Maru, the Dejarik arena in The Mandalorian and Grogu, Citizens United and Hawaii's Corporate Power Reset, a cough that shows up after eating certain foods, the woman who touches the hem of Jesus's garment, Augustine on miracles as intensifications rather than violations of natural law, quantum physics and the observer problem, the Apostle Paul's thorn in the flesh, and a particular kind of stubbornness that turns out to be badly needed in the world right now.

Find the floor beneath the floor. Address it there. And when the floor turns out to be your own attachment to the problem rather than the problem itself, find the grace in that too.