The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.