Deep Literacy

Deep Literacy is a lens. Nothing in the world changes when you pick it up, but quite a lot becomes visible.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

Watch a master carpenter teach an apprentice. He does not lecture; he lets the boy hold the wrong end of the saw until the wood itself becomes the teacher.

Learning is the one wealth that survives every partition of fortune. And when you forget it — you will — the world will remind you. It is a faithful tutor.