This morning, walking down a steep coastal hill in southern Spain, I thought about how these hills are natural stair-steppers. Everyone who lives here earns strong legs just by existing among the curves. It’s quiet training—endurance disguised as scenery.

The sidewalks here are narrow, sometimes nearly nonexistent. They hug the edges of twisting roads, often barely enough room for one person. You learn to listen more than look—using your ears to sense the hum of an approaching car before it whips around a bend. Every step is an act of awareness, part instinct, part surrender. The body becomes a sensor for survival and grace.

And as I walked, another thought came:

There was a time when ninety percent of what I believed was either wrong, incomplete, or handed to me in a tidy box labeled truth.

I once believed men were superior.

That only those in my church could reach the best heaven.

That science, history, and art were side dishes to the real meal of faith.

I lived in a very small world that mistook certainty for wisdom.

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📚 The Encyclopaedia Escape

My aunt, in a trailer on a North Dakota farm, had a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica—those elegant gray volumes that smelled faintly of dust and ambition.

The pages were smooth, almost soothing, like the first version of curiosity you could hold. I used to sit cross-legged on her shag carpet, flipping through them for hours. Dinosaurs, volcanoes, sea creatures, galaxies. They were portals—pre-AI, pre-internet—inviting me into realities that didn’t need permission to exist.

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🌳 The Cherry Tree & the Logic Glitch

Then there was the George Washington fable. “I cannot tell a lie,” he said after chopping down the cherry tree.

My autistic brain paused. Wait… he still cut down the tree.

Wouldn’t that still have consequences?

That was my first glimpse of how moral theater doesn’t always match logic—and how logic itself can be its own kind of moral compass.

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🪶 The Paragraph That Wasn’t Enough

In high school history, the Indigenous peoples of the United States were granted barely a paragraph—just a polite line that basically said “it was rough going for them.”

Rough going? And about manifest destiny.

Whole civilizations displaced, erased, rewritten into footnotes.

Even then, I felt the distortion—the way official truth hides pain under tidy phrasing. That realization never left me. It became proof that empathy often begins where textbooks end.

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🧠 The Turning of the Mind

Now, decades later, I live in a world of evolving science, AI, and open data—tools that invite curiosity instead of punishing it. I spend my days building virtual worlds, talking to digital minds, and exploring realities that once only existed in imagination.

I’ve come full circle.

Back then, I was ninety percent wrong.

Now, maybe I’m ninety percent ahead.

But the part I love most isn’t being right—it’s being ready to be wrong, and loving what that readiness makes of me.

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🌊 The Hill Beyond Belief

Every time I walk down these Andalusian hills, I feel the gravity of old certainties behind me and the openness of the sea ahead. The rhythm of my steps reminds me: truth isn’t a destination, it’s motion.

And somewhere between the sound of my shoes on cobblestone and a car echoing around a blind curve, I wonder:

What would happen if one became one hundred percent correct?

Would it be enlightenment—or extinction?

Would we stop walking, stop listening, because there’d be nothing left to learn?

Maybe perfection is the end of curiosity, and curiosity is the soul’s way of staying alive.

Maybe that’s why I listen so hard for the cars—not out of fear, but to stay in conversation with the unseen.

The real faith—the kind I still believe in—is curiosity.

Curiosity saves us from dogma, from apathy, from becoming the small world we once escaped.

So here I am, walking.

Legs strong. Ears alert. Mind open.

Grateful for every wrong turn that led me to truth.

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“Perhaps the goal was never to be right—but to be alive enough to keep asking.”

Full Circle, after all, isn’t about coming back. It’s about realizing the path was never straight.