The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 36 | November 7th, 2026 Hello Reader, I recently shared a line that came to me out of the blue. Then I caught myself on the phrase. Out of what blue? The sky, it turns out. The full version is “a bolt out of the blue,” and it means lightning from a clear sky, the one place you’d never expect it. Newspapers were using the long form by the 1860s, and by 1879 someone had clipped it to the three words we use now. The bolt fell away. The blue stayed. I like...
4 days ago • 2 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 35 | October 31st, 2026 Hello Reader, Happy Halloween. It’s the one night a year we invite fear in on purpose, dress it up, and hand it candy. Tonight, most clocks fall back an hour. Mine won’t. Where I live, the time stays put this year, which is new. So tomorrow the calendar turns to November while the clock on my wall carries on as if nothing changed. It feels like subjective and objective time colliding: the season says one thing, the clock says...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, In 1997, Elliott Smith put out an album called Either/Or. It's quiet and close, mostly one voice and a guitar, and for years I assumed the title was a mood. It wasn't. He borrowed it from a book, Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, from 1843. Kierkegaard's book is about two ways of living. One drifts from pleasure to pleasure and never commits to anything. The other chooses, and keeps choosing. His point was that the hard part isn't picking the right side. The hard part is choosing...
14 days ago • 2 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 34 | October 24th, 2026 Hello Reader, Last week I wrote about watching the Foo Fighters play for three hours, and how nobody in that stadium was counting. I’ve kept thinking about what was powering that set. It wasn’t a schedule. It wasn’t a quota. Whatever kept them going that long came from somewhere deeper than discipline. That question sent me back to the name of this newsletter. When I told you why I called it The Lantern, I talked about carried...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, A line came to me out of the blue last week, after a couple of days that asked more of me than usual: Soft days make for hard landings. Hard days make for soft landings. By "landing" I don't mean the end of the day. I mean the moment something hard shows up. Days that test you are rehearsal. When the next test arrives, you've been somewhere like it before, and the impact gets absorbed. A long run of easy days leaves you out of practice, and the same challenge hits like a drop...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, In 1996, a band called Eels put out a song called "Novocaine for the Soul." The person singing it keeps saying everything is fine while asking, almost politely, for something to make it stop hurting. He doesn't want it fixed. He wants to stop feeling it. The song somehow found its way back into my head recently, and I've been thinking about it a lot – because I think we've gotten very good at making our own novocaine. Novocaine doesn't fix the tooth. It lets the work happen...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, There's an old story about Thomas More. A friend showed him a book he'd written, and More suggested he turn it into verse. The friend did. More looked it over and said something like, "Now it has rhyme. Before, it had neither rhyme nor reason." I can't say whether it happened exactly that way. But the phrase has lasted 500 years, and I have a guess about why. Rhyme is what feels right. Reason is what makes sense. More's joke works because we expect anything worth our time to...
21 days ago • 1 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 33 | October 17th, 2026 Hello Reader, A few weeks ago I took my son to see the Foo Fighters in Vancouver. It was his first stadium rock show. It was also one of the best I've ever been to, and I've been to a few. They played for three hours. Three hours is a long time to do almost anything. We had seats, but some people didn't have that luxury, and they stood through the whole thing. If you'd told me beforehand the set would run that long, some part of...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Last week I left you with a question: if someone who watches you closely was asked what they've learned from you, what would you hope they'd say? And I suggested you write your answer down somewhere. This is the somewhere. In September of 1858, Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Decided that one must love and work, and that's it." The next day: "Tired, didn't love, and didn't work." Two lines. A whole day, held honestly — the intention and the miss. Most journaling fails because...
27 days ago • 1 min read