Journal – Trance Blackman

Here you’ll find my philosophical meanderings in the form of articles, essays, and occasional poetry. My interests and curiosities are broad, but the central focus remains the pursuit of what is authentic, real, and true.

Lux et veritas

Journal Entries / narratives (26 Posts)

Showing posts tagged “narratives”. Clear filter

The Reality We Inherited

15 August 2026 ~ 8 minute read

There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes from maintaining a reality some deeper part of you no longer believes. You can learn to live with the contradictions, explain away the inconsistencies, and keep moving through the machinery of everyday life, but the questions remain. Perhaps the greater discomfort isn’t discovering that something you believed was untrue. Perhaps it’s realizing how much of yourself you invested in believing it.

Cancer: The Story Beneath the Disease

15 August 2026 ~ 5 minute read

Perhaps the most difficult thing to reconcile when confronting illness, especially cancer, is the possibility that we have misunderstood not only disease, but ourselves. We have inherited countless ideas about what the body is, what it is capable of, what threatens it, and where its authority ultimately resides. Yet beneath those accumulated narratives is something quieter and considerably older: an intelligence that has accompanied us from the beginning, asking very little except that we stop long enough to remember it.

The Industrial Devolution

07 July 2026 (rev. 09 July 2026) ~ 9 minute read

Every era tells itself a story about progress. We inherit those stories long before we possess the discernment to question them, and, more often than not, spend much of our lives defending assumptions we never consciously chose. But every so often, something begins to unravel. A contradiction becomes too obvious to ignore, and the narratives that once seemed self-evident begin to reveal themselves as carefully maintained illusions.

Fire and Death

17 June 2026 ~ 5 minute read

Some ideas linger at the edge of awareness until circumstances drag them into the foreground. A distant column of smoke on the horizon. A phone call in the middle of the evening. A conversation that suddenly turns reflective. Certain realities have a way of interrupting our routines and reminding us of things we spend most of our lives trying not to think about. Fire is one of them. Death is another.

A Wider Field

10 June 2026 ~ 3 minute read

There is a difference between paying attention and becoming consumed by what is directly in front of us. One sharpens our awareness; the other narrows it. Somewhere between distraction and fixation lies a quieter state of presence, one that allows us to remain grounded in the moment while still remembering to look toward the horizon.

Grand Visions, Ungrounded

06 June 2026 (rev. 12 June 2026) ~ 11 minute read

Most people never stop to consider how much energy, attention, labor, and capital disappear into ideas that never become reality. We celebrate ambition, scale, and grand visions, yet rarely ask what is sacrificed along the way, or what might have been built instead. Somewhere between the promise and the outcome, countless resources are consumed, while simpler, more immediate, and more human solutions remain largely overlooked.