Yes. Today was a good day.

Not a monumental day. Nobody called with earth-shattering news. I didn’t discover the secret of artificial intelligence or solve one of the great problems of existence. I finished the newsletter. I washed the inside of my windows, which had been washed from the outside last week, and suddenly the trees outside seemed even closer. The birds apparently thought so too. A few of them seemed to be considering whether the newly invisible glass was actually there.

I hung a painting. I sat in my wonderful new motorized recliner, which has somehow reorganized my entire living room and perhaps a small part of my life. I looked around and realized that things were, for the moment anyway, pretty much where they belonged.

And then I got hungry. So I made amatriciana.

I learned to make it around 1976 from Dr. Teeter, an elderly philosophy professor I boarded with when I was an undergraduate. She became something like a second mother to me and appears again and again in the memoirs I’ve been writing. But one of the things she gave me required no philosophy whatsoever.

Bacon or salt pork, diced up. About a cup.
Onion, diced up. About the same amount.
A can of crushed tomatoes.
Red pepper flakes.
That’s basically it.

There are undoubtedly Italians who could explain to me everything that’s wrong with this recipe. They can save their breath. I’ve been eating it this way for fifty years, and it is delicious.

Tonight I may have gotten a little carried away with the red pepper flakes. Every few bites there’s a moment when the heat announces itself rather forcefully. But that only makes dinner more challenging. I take another bite.

Still delicious.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about getting centered. There are so many things happening. So many projects. So many possibilities. Artificial intelligence has opened doors faster than I can possibly walk through them. I’m thinking about websites and books and friends and writing and automation and what the next six months might become.

And yet perhaps getting centered sometimes means something much simpler.

You finish what needs finishing. You clean your windows. You hang a painting. You notice the birds. And then you chop an onion.

What strikes me tonight is how comfortably all these different periods of my life coexist. I’m 77 years old, sitting in a remarkable chair surrounded by technology that would have seemed like science fiction in 1976, talking every day with an artificial intelligence about what we’re going to build next.

And I’m eating the same pasta Dr. Teeter taught me to make when I was a young man.

I’ve lived an exciting life. I still seem to be living one. But tonight none of it needs to be particularly profound.

Sometimes life can just be a bowl of pasta that’s a little too hot, a glass of wine, clean windows, birds in the trees, and the wonderful realization that, at least for this particular evening, there’s nowhere else you need to be.

And damn, this is delicious.