The truth is so close she couldn't be closer.

“All-in-one?” That reminded me of the last time I went to the supermarket to buy shampoo. Browsing the shelves, I always come across a bottle labeled "all-in-one" – shampoo, conditioner, and sometimes even body wash in a single product.

This is exactly what the philosopher Heraclitus would buy. For he said that all is one. (To be precise, he said that it's not him who is saying that but it's logic, aka "logos".)

I never buy the all-in-one bottle because of the ingredients. And so I keep my hygiene products separate.

But the logic remains true. All is one.

If you know the meaning of this word, you know the meaning of any word. Everthing is literally a word. Even nothing is a word.

When I squeeze it, it makes a honky sound. It's an important sound for my students. I use it to condition them, signaling key moments in the class.

Today in class, I removed it's head to talk about working like a headless chicken. Then I screwed the head back on. When I squeezed it, it made that honky sound again.

The noise this plastic bird makes is the voice of the universe.

I love the sensation when taking the first sip: how it prickles on the tip of my tongue.

It's when the entirety of the universe collapes into just that one sensational singularity.

The capacity to focus for long stretches of time (20 to 90 minutes) is essential to developing mastery in any discipline. For the sake of lengthening attention span, all practices that demand undivided focus qualify. Think of a martial artist practicing a single movement for an hour without pause. A meditation practice such as zazen(just sitting) attempts to drop all action. What's left? Pure attention; pure awareness; pure consciousness. It's essentially doing nothing but being.

Now, consider this: what does doing nothing mean? Nothing doesn't exist.

So if you can master doing nothing, you’ve already learned how to master everything.

Single-pointed focus of being is the key.

Of course, by all apparent evidence, knowledge seems to change. It’s well documented that what we seem to know today differs from what we thought we know a century ago. Yet this raises a deeper question: what exactly is it that we really know? And a good follow-up question is: can we really say that we know anything truly if what we know keeps changing?

As a philosopher, I’m not interested in apparent knowledge. I’m interested in real knowledge.

Then comes the unsettling question: how do we know for sure that we are not confusing knowing with believing?

If we don’t even know what knowing truly means, the entire enterprise of human understanding risks operating upon a false premise – and all research may turn out to be nothing more than an elaborate daydream.

She asked the question in Vietnamese, but her aunt translated it for me into English.

I said, “Infinity is without boundary.” Her aunt kept translating. The girl tilted her head. “What’s a boundary?”

So, I tried again. “It’s without limit, without border or outline. Infinity has no end – but also no beginning.”

She smiled, turned away, and went back to the little card game she had made herself. I looked at her aunt and parents and said, almost in awe, “What an amazing question.”

Later, I kept thinking about my answer. I had only described infinity through negation – what it isn’t: no boundary, no limit, no end, no start. Yet infinity is so rich. It’s vastness beyond vastness. I failed to pass on the immeasurable richness of infinity to that little girl.

I remembered reading, as a teenager, a text by a philosopher who was struggling to imagine infinity. In German, vorstellen – “to imagine” – literally means “to place before.” But how could one place before oneself that which has no outline, no front, no back, no form? How to contain in an area that which cannot be contained? Even in English, to “imagine” means to form an image – to copy something into the mind’s eye. But boundlessness can’t be framed. Limitlessness exists untouchable by any containment whatsoever.

I thought of my math classes too, where infinity was always something we reached for by counting: start somewhere, keep going, never stop. But that kind of infinity is one-sided – it has a beginning. And if there’s a beginning, there’s already a limit. This means that a-symmetrical infinity isn’t truly infinite.

So how can we understand infinity without defining it by what it’s not? The best word I found thus far is “open.” Infinity is openness itself. Infinity is pure openness – an opening that cannot be contained by anything.