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God Does Not Play Dice—He Deals the Cards

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  “God does not play dice with the universe.” Einstein’s famous protest against quantum randomness has echoed through decades of philosophical debate. But I’ve been sitting with a different formulation lately, one that feels truer to the texture of lived experience: God does not play dice. He deals the cards. This shift from dice to cards may seem subtle, but I believe it changes everything. Dice are pure event. They tumble, they land, and something happens to you . There is no you in the equation after the throw. You are merely the surface the dice land upon. But cards are different. Cards sit in your hand. They become yours in some intimate way, even though you never chose them. A terrible hand is still your terrible hand. And what you do with it becomes a kind of authorship. I’ve often found myself caught between two unsatisfying positions when thinking about fate, chance, and meaning. The first is the overclaim: everything happens for a reason . This can become a kind o...
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The Role of Documentation in Software Development

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 Documentation isn't overhead. It builds alignment, detects problems early, and preserves knowledge—transforming individual problem-solving into organizational intelligence.   Engineers are fundamentally problem-solvers. We focus on technical excellence and delivering solutions. But here’s what we often overlook: in modern software development, solving a problem effectively is inseparable from communicating that solution to others. Why Documentation Matters: Three Interconnected Benefits Documentation delivers three core benefits: alignment through transparency—surfacing misalignments early when they’re cheap to fix rather than in production; early detection by shifting problem-solving from code to design, where costs are lowest; and knowledge preservation that protects both your team’s institutional memory and your future self from recreating context you’ve already moved past. Building Shared Understanding and Alignment Software development is inherently collaborati...
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When the Heart Breaks Open: A Meditation on Tonglen & Finding Connection Through Pain

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Like many people, I started meditating to find peace—to quiet my wild monkey mind and detach from my racing thoughts and emotions. For a while, I thought that's what meditation was supposed to be: pushing away discomfort, observing from a distance, staying calm and collected. Then life broke me open. In the last couple of years, I went through the worst possible tragedy. My heart was shattered, and the pain was too large to push away. Trying to detach from it felt not just impossible, but wrong. Like I was betraying myself and was being inauthentic. The Practice That Changed Everything That's when I found Tonglen in Pema Chödrön's book When Things Fall Apart —which felt like the perfect title for my life at that moment. Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that means "giving and taking," and it does something that sounds completely backwards: instead of pushing pain away, you breathe it in. On the in-breath, you take in darkness and pain. On the out-breath...
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The Theater of Self: the Hero-Director cut

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  During a moment of quiet reflection, I arrived at an unsettling truth: I create the dramas that consume my life, drawn to the intoxicating rush of emotions they provide. When one drama fades, another emerges almost instinctively. I don't push them away because these emotions make me feel alive. But I don't just cast myself as the protagonist in these dramas—I also appoint myself director. I meticulously script outcomes, orchestrate plot twists, and harbor quiet expectations that everyone around me will follow my vision. When reality inevitably deviates from this imagined screenplay, distress follows. I make adjustments, attempt corrections, but control slips through my fingers, exposing the futility of my efforts. At its core, this protagonist-director urge stems from the human mind's craving for drama's emotional vitality and control's perceived security against uncertainty. Everyone Is the Hero of Their Own Story This realization extends beyond my personal t...
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The Wisdom of Sparkling Water: A Meditation on the Nature of Mind

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Today, in the quiet sanctuary of meditation, before me sat a simple glass of sparkling water—effervescent, alive with movement, yet contained within transparent walls. As I settled into stillness, watching the ceaseless dance of bubbles rising from invisible depths to burst at the surface, a profound recognition began to unfold. Here, in this humble vessel, lay a perfect mirror of the human condition, a crystalline metaphor for the very nature of consciousness itself.       The Theater of Bubbles We are, each of us, like this sparkling water—vessels containing multiple streams of consciousness that bubble up from unknown depths. Some thoughts emerge large and commanding, demanding immediate attention like urgent emotions that overwhelm the psyche. Others remain subtle whispers, the quiet background hum of sensation that accompanies our every breath. These bubbles don't arise from a single source but from various currents of awareness, each following its own mysterious...
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