It is 6:45 AM. The goal is linear and straightforward: Put on shoes, grab keys, leave the house for a run.

But my brain doesn’t do linear.

I grab my hat, but on the way to the door, I notice a medical bill on the counter. Did I pay that? I stop to check. Yeah, I handled it last night. Good. But now I’ve put my keys down on the table to check the paper. I turn back to the door and realize I need headphones. They aren’t on the charging pad.

I ping them. The chirp is coming from upstairs. I sprint up the steps in my running shoes, which I know I shouldn’t wear on the carpet, and sneak into the bedroom to grab them. But seeing the closet reminds me I didn’t pack a windbreaker. I grab the jacket.

By the time I’m back at the door, I am anxious. I have the jacket, the headphones, and the hat. But where are the keys?

I look at the medical bill. They are sitting right on top of it.

I am five minutes late. My heart is racing. I haven’t even stepped outside, and I’m feeling less excited to go. I thought I had given myself enough time, but the math never works.

My wife, watching this chaos unfold for the thousandth time, once put it perfectly. She wasn’t being critical; she was just observing. She said:

She didn’t mean it as an insult. In a world built on efficiency and deadlines, “interesting” sounds like a luxury. “Important” is how you get out the door.

But a few months later, she sent me a podcast about neurodiversity, and suddenly, the chaos of my morning made sense.

The 200,000-Year-Old Explanation

The podcast featured Thom Hartmann, an anthropologist who proposed something that felt less like theory and more like answers. He calls it the Hunter vs. Farmer Hypothesis.

Hartmann argues that for 99% of human history, being “distractable” wasn’t a deficit. It was a survival skill.

A Hunter’s brain is designed for constant, peripheral scanning. It is hyper-aware. In the wild, you want the person who notices the slight change in the wind or the way the birds suddenly go quiet. If you hyper-focus on a single task, like picking berries, and ignore the “interesting” rustle in the tall grass, you don’t make it home.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, we invented farming.

Farming requires a linear timeline: Prepare the soil, plant the seed, wait, harvest. Success for a Farmer depends on the ability to ignore the “interesting” distractions and stay focused on the “important” routine.

The problem? We paved the wilderness and built a world entirely for Farmers. Schools, offices, and even the “simple” act of getting ready for a run are built on Farmer logic.

In this world, the Hunter isn’t seen as an explorer; he’s seen as broken. We are told we have an attention deficit. But Hartmann argues we don’t have a deficit of attention; we have a surplus of awareness. The logic is simple: If you are walking in the woods and you hear a twig snap, you want the guy who gets distracted

The Night Run

I saw this surplus of awareness in action a few weeks ago. I was on a night run with my trail running group. We reached a dark junction in the woods and stopped to wait for the rest of the pack.

Most of the group was restless. But my friend Graeme, who also has an “interesting” brain, was perfectly still. He was staring back into the pitch-black trail we had just descended.

“We should get going,” someone said. “Everyone is here.”

The group leader had already done a head count and started down the trail. But not Graeme.

“I don’t think so,” Graeme said, his eyes never leaving the dark. “I think there is one more.”

Graeme didn’t budge. He wasn’t looking at a watch; he was monitoring the woods. The group was in the distance already, but I hung back with Graeme. A few seconds passed. Then I heard it. A twig snap. A stumble.

Out of the dark, Dave emerged. He had forgotten a headlamp. He was navigating by the gray light of the moon, tripping over roots, terrified a mountain lion was stalking him.

If we only focused on what was “important”, the route, Dave would have been left alone in the dark.

Graeme wasn’t “distracted” by the woods. He was the only one truly present in them.

The Asset of “Interesting”

For years, I lived as a frustrated “bad Farmer.” I thought my inability to stay in the neat rows was a character flaw I had to solve through sheer willpower.

But the trail taught me something different.

The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the Farmer. We have spent a century optimizing for efficiency, and now we have AI tools that can “farm” better and faster than humans. If the job is just following a linear path, the machines have us beat.

But the machine, and the Farmer, can only see what is “important” based on the plan. They fail to notice the “interesting” thing happening just off the path.

This is where the Hunter’s brain becomes a competitive advantage. My tendency to get “distracted” by a medical bill or a footnote in a research paper isn’t a bug; it’s foraging. It’s the ability to follow a scent trail.

Most of my best ideas, the ones that actually matter, didn’t come from a linear to-do list. They entered from the periphery. They came from noticing hidden things in plain sight, or realizing how something “irrelevant” connected to the problem in front of me.

In a paved world, we don’t need Hunters to protect the tribe from tigers anymore. We need them to stir the pot. We need people willing to look away from the rows to find the future.

The Balance

I still struggle in the mornings. I still lose my keys. Knowing about the Hunter theory didn’t magically fix my executive function.

But it did change my perspective.

I realized that the brain that circled back to check the medical bill, the one that made me late, is the exact same brain that heard the twig snap in the woods. I can’t stop the part of me that scans for danger without also stopping the part of me that finds the insight. They are a package deal.

We live in a world that worships the Farmer. We reward the straight line and the efficient process. And there is sense in that. Civilization relies on the harvest.

But we cannot survive on efficiency alone.

My wife was right: She focuses on what is important. I am thankful that she does. But I focus on what is interesting.

In a world that is becoming increasingly automated, algorithmic, and predictable, we don’t just need people who can plant the rows.

We need people who can hear the twig snap.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

If you spend ten minutes in a room with disruptors, someone will inevitably quote Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

It is brilliant rhetoric. It is also extremely dangerous for education.

EdTech founders love this quote because it acts as a shield. It ignores the user. It suggests that the technologist is all-knowing. It creates a power dynamic that frames teachers and students not as co-designers, but as Luddites, people stuck in the past, begging for a faster horse, unaware that an amazing new technology is coming to save them.

For Ford’s company, the logic worked. His goal was efficiency, standardization, and speed. He wanted to move parts down the assembly line. He made a lot of money.

But for the rest of the country? I am not so sure it was a good deal. And when we apply Ford’s logic to complex human systems, we don’t just get more cars; we get consequences. Ford didn’t just replace the horse; he launched more than a century of infrastructure optimized for machine rather than people.

Schools are not factories. Students are not cars. And as history shows, when you redesign the world around the machine, the results are catastrophic.

Part II: The Urban Parable

To see the damage, we don’t need to look at the car; we need to look at a highway map of New York City.

The natural legacy of Henry Ford’s mindset was Robert Moses. He was the bureaucratic architect of New York, the ultimate technocrat. Like today’s AI engineers, Moses viewed the world from high above. He didn’t see vibrant neighborhoods. He saw clutter.

To him, the narrow streets, old buildings, and children playing on corners looked like system failure. It was inefficient. It slowed down traffic. His solution was to retrofit the city for the cutting-edge technology of his day: the automobile.

Moses championed The Expressway. A marvel of engineering designed for efficiency, it prioritizes throughput, with no stoplights and no interactions. Moses took a sledgehammer to the city, bulldozing vibrant neighborhoods like the South Bronx, disproportionately displacing Black and Brown communities, severing the social fabric and replacing the “front porch” with the “off-ramp.”

We are still paying the price for this “efficiency” today. We live with infrastructure built for the machine: roads designed to erase our humanity, where cars dominate our lifestyle and we are left isolated and disconnected. And in the process, we locked ourselves into an environmental disaster that is choking our planet.

Moses succeeded in moving cars. But in doing so, he broke the world.

But in 1961, one woman stood in the way. Jane Jacobs was not an architect. She was a journalist who lived in Greenwich Village, and she looked at the city not from an airplane, but from the sidewalk. Where Moses saw “inefficiency,” Jacobs saw vitality.

She argued that the safety and health of a city didn’t come from traffic flow; it came from the “Sidewalk Ballet.” It came from the messy, inefficient collisions of people: the shopkeeper watching the street, the kids playing on the stoop, the conversations between neighbors.

The stoplights, the corners, and the crowded sidewalks forced people to interact, and that created trust, safety, and innovation.

Moses won the battle for infrastructure; we built the highways. But Jacobs holds the needed solution to this nightmare.

Part III: The Classroom Ballet

The tragedy of the expressway is that it solved the wrong problem. While focusing on movement and machines, it killed human connection.

Today, in the rush to integrate AI into schools, we are focusing on building expressways. We want the AI to do the work for us. We want AI tutors that deliver content seamlessly, letting students avoid the challenging social negotiations of the classroom.

But if we take a page from the great progressive educator John Dewey, we see that this “friction” isn’t a bug. It is the objective.

Dewey understood what Jacobs understood: Democracy and Education are born in collision.

Just as a city needs the “Sidewalk Ballet” to function, a classroom needs productive struggle. On an expressway, if you slow down, you create a traffic jam. But on a sidewalk, if you slow down, you create a conversation. Learning is not the efficient download of information. It is the messy, inefficient struggle of articulating an idea to a classmate, having it challenged, and refining it.

When we use AI to smooth the struggle, when we use ChatGPT to write the draft or an adaptive algorithm to personalize the path for the student, we are bulldozing the sidewalk. We are removing the very thing that makes learning valuable and human.

Part IV: The Warning (Lawrence Cremin)

So why are we so tempted to build these educational expressways? Why would we choose Ford’s efficiency over Dewey’s humanity?

The historian Lawrence Cremin gave us the answer back in 1961, ironically, the same year Jacobs published her defense of the city.

In The Transformation of the School, Cremin chronicled the collapse of the Progressive Education movement. He argued that we didn’t abandon human-centered education because it didn’t work. We abandoned it because we got scared.

In the 1950s, the Cold War and Sputnik created a national panic. We became obsessed with “Hard Skills,” “Efficiency,” and beating the Soviets. We didn’t have time for messy collaborations. We needed engineers, and we needed them now.

Panic drives efficiency. When we are scared, we stop caring about the sidewalk, and start demanding the expressway.

Today, we are in a new panic. The race to AI is our Sputnik. We are terrified of “future relevance.” We are being told that if we don’t optimize our students for the algorithm, they will be left behind.

So, we are doing what we always do: We are building tools that make school faster, easier, and more solitary, hoping that efficiency will save us.

Part V: The Power of the Pause

We cannot be Luddites. We cannot eliminate cars, and we cannot ban AI.

But we can refuse to accept the logic of the factory.

The ultimate irony of the “Faster Horse” fallacy is that it assumes speed is the goal. In a Ford factory or on a Moses highway, slowness is a defect. It means a broken part or a traffic jam. But in a classroom, slowness is the point.

Understanding doesn’t happen at 60 miles per hour. It happens in the pause. It happens when a student gets stuck, stops, and asks a neighbor for help. It happens in the friction of a debate. When we optimize education for speed, using AI to generate the essay, smooth the path, or “personalize” the struggle away, we eliminate the very moment where learning actually occurs.

We have a choice between Expressway AI and Sidewalk AI.

Expressway AI tries to bypass the struggle. It answers the question, writes the code, and creates the slide deck. It gets the student from A to B instantly, leaving them isolated and unskilled.

Sidewalk AI facilitates the struggle. It doesn’t shut down thinking; it connects students. It acts like the streetlights on Jane Jacobs’ corner, illuminating the interactions, forcing us to stop and look at each other, and keeping the “Ballet” alive.

We are being told that the future belongs to the fast. But history tells us that when we build only for speed, we break the things that matter.

We don’t need faster horses. We need the courage to slow down.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

I was staring down a thousand-foot drop, pinned in place by a five-foot strip of bulletproof ice.

My La Sportiva scrambling shoes, aggressive, sticky-soled tools I trust on technical rock, were suddenly useless. They were built for friction on granite, but on this small patch of glassy ice, they offered speed without control.

My friend Aaron and I were traversing the Sawtooth, a jagged, exposed arête connecting the Colorado 14ers of Bierstadt and Blue Sky. We had the fitness, the gear for the expected conditions, and the map. But this June ice chute was an anomaly. We couldn’t kick a step into it. If we slipped, there was nothing to stop us from plummeting into the bowl below.

We were forced to retreat, spending the next hour down-climbing a thousand feet of loose scree just to cross at a safe spot.

We learned a physics lesson on that ridge: Popular wisdom tells us friction is the enemy, it slows us down. But in the mountains, friction is the only thing that gets you through.

Without a grip, you have no path.

I’ve been thinking about that ice chute a lot lately, not in terms of scrambling, but in terms of thinking and learning.

In the technology world, we don’t call it “ice”; we call it “efficiency.”

Modern tools glorify the frictionless solution. We want the essay written without facing the terror of the blank page. We want the code to run without the frustration of the bug. We want the “Key Takeaways” without spending the time to read the book. We want AI to summarize the Zoom meetings instead of actually synthesizing what was said.

We have spent billions of dollars trying to sand down the rough edges of reality so that we can glide right through it.

But standing on that ridge, I realized the danger of a frictionless world: When you remove the friction, you remove the agency.

On ice, you are no longer a climber; you are a projectile. You have speed, without control.

This is the hidden crisis of the AI age. We worry that AI will “hallucinate” or “cheat,” but the real danger is that it is simply too smooth. To understand what we are losing, we have to understand the engineering of attachment.

Cognitive Velcro

In 1941, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral went for a walk in the Alps. He came back annoyed; his pants and his dog were covered in burdock burrs.

But when he looked at the burrs under a microscope, his annoyance turned to awe.

He peered through the lens expecting to see a tangled mess of plant fibers. Instead, he saw biological engineering.

He saw thousands of tiny hooks engaging with the loops of his fabric. He realized that “grip” wasn’t an accident; it was biological design at its best. That observation led to the invention of Velcro.

Learning is Cognitive Velcro.

To make an idea stick, the mind needs hooks and loops. It needs the “snag” of a difficult problem. It needs the texture of a rough draft. It needs the resistance of a counter-argument.

When we use AI to smooth out thinking and learning, we are stripping off the “burrs.” We are creating a mental surface that is too smooth. Ideas hit our Teflon minds, and they slide right off. Maybe we get to the answer faster, but we arrive there with no agency.

The Wisdom of the Broken Spine

So, if “grip” is the goal, where do we find it?

It turns out the grip is in the wear. The evidence of learning shouldn’t look pristine. It should look used.

In their book The Social Life of Information, researchers John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid describe the difference between a clean digital database and a physical object. They focus on the information buried in the physical wear and tear.

Consider two versions of a cookbook.

The first is the output of an LLM. It is perfectly formatted. It is grammatically flawless. It is the “Ice Chute” of information, optimized for delivery. But when you look at it, you can’t discern what is important. Every part has equal weight.

The second is your grandmother’s cookbook that has been sitting in your kitchen for over twenty years.

When you set the latter on the counter, something magical happens: It falls open.

The spine is cracked at exactly page 142, the recipe for the Chicken Cacciatore. And when you look at that page, the history of the work is visible. There is a ring of olive oil where the bottle sat. There is a smear of flour right next to the most confusing paragraph of instructions.

That crack in the binding and that smear of oil are not damage; they are metadata. They are physical traces of value. The broken spine tells you, “This is the one that works.” The stain tells you, “This is the part that gets messy.”

But in our current obsession with efficiency, we mistake this wear for damage. We think the goal is a pristine answer, a flawless email, or a perfectly optimized schedule.

When we use AI to smooth out our work, to auto-complete the sentence, to generate the code, to optimize the route, we are essentially photoshopping the cracks out of the spine and the stains off the page. We get the information, but we lose the wisdom. We erase the informative traces that define how we move through the world.

We lose the physical signal that tells us: “This is where the friction happened. Pay attention.”

The Ghost in the Car

Why can’t the AI leave a stain? Why can’t it crack the spine?

An AI, by contrast, has no body. It lives in a world of pure text, a frictionless universe of statistical noise. It knows that the word “fall” often follows the word “jump,” but it has never experienced the thud.

I found the answer while watching a lecture by Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

LeCun argued that a house cat navigates reality better than our most advanced AI. Why? Because the cat has a “World Model.”

The cat learns through friction, momentum, and the consequence of falling. It has skin in the game. The grandmother also learns through consequence.

When we outsource our thinking to the machine, when we let it write the plan or navigate the route, we are putting a ghost in the driver’s seat. It might know the map perfectly, but it has no feel for the road.

Designing for Grip

So, what do we do? We cannot smash the machines. The ice is here to stay. But we can choose where we step.

The goal of the future isn’t to be faster than the AI; it is to have more traction. We need to double down on grip.

In our schools and our work, we must intentionally re-introduce friction. We need to value the “burrs” of messy collaboration. We need to trust the “broken spine” of a well-worn idea over the pristine polish of a generated summary. We need to recognize that the struggle is the signal.

Navigational agency doesn’t come from the smooth path. It comes from the rough one.

Back on the Sawtooth Ridge, after retreating from the ice, Aaron and I found a different route. It was a scramble up a loose, jagged gully of scree. It was ugly. It was exhausting. It was slow.

But every time I put my foot down, the rock held me in place. I had traction. I had control.

I looked down at my shoes, covered in dust and scratched by the granite. They weren’t clean, and they weren’t fast. But they were holding me to the mountain.

We don’t need more speed. We don’t need more ice. In a frictionless world, traction is the only thing that counts.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

The ranger at Hans Flat Station didn’t mince words. “Be careful,” she said, sliding the permit across the counter. “The Maze is remote. It is one of the remotest places in the world.”

Outside, a fresh dusting of snow covered the red rocks. It was quiet. More than a lack of noise, quiet meant a lack of help. She pointed to a jagged island of rock on the map: Pete’s Mesa. “If you can find a way up there,” she said, tracing a line that didn’t actually exist, “there are bighorn sheep. But there’s no trail.”

Two days later, I was staring at a wall of vertical limestone. I was obsessed with reaching that mesa. I had tracked it from the riverbed. I had scrambled up side canyons that looked promising, only to be cliffed out 200 feet short of my goal.

I was hot. I was tired. And I was stuck. In the wilderness, a dead end is a physical fact. It means you backtrack. It means you admit you were wrong, drink your rationed water, and re-trace your steps to try again. Sometimes it is so frustrating you wonder what you are doing out there at all.

In the wilderness, a dead end is a physical fact. It means you admit you were wrong.

In that moment, looking up at the unreachable green pastures of the Mesa, I suddenly imagined a helicopter rising over the cliffs in front of me. As its swirling blades lifted red dust into the air, it flowered itself onto the sandstone bench on my right. The pilot waves me over. “Hop in,” he says. “I can drop you off up there on Pete’s Mesa.”

Blinking my eyes against the sweat, I considered the offer.

This is the seductive promise of AI. It is the helicopter on the bench. When we hit a “Dead End,” a coding bug, a blank page staring us down, a concept we can’t quite grasp, the AI lands. It provides an answer. It says: “Why backtrack? Why suffer? Here is what you wanted.”

But imagine I had taken that ride. I would have stood on Pete’s Mesa, sure. You could even argue that I had “accomplished” the goal. But I would have killed the journey.

The Maze is not a collection of waypoints; it is an exercise in wayfinding. The value wasn’t the destination, even though that is what I craved. The value was the resonance — my hands on the sandstone, my mind reading the silence.

Because I didn’t have the helicopter, I had to stay in the struggle. I had to engage in what Donald Schön calls the “Backtalk” of the situation. The rock said “No,” so I had to listen. I had to change my approach. I had to let my ADHD brain enter a state of hyper-focus, scanning the cliff face for a single weakness.

And because I stayed, I found it. A tiny, improbable chute. A weakness in the armor of the cliffs. I climbed 200 feet of loose, terrifying rock. I hauled myself over the lip of the Mesa, gasping for air, alone on that mystical plateau.

The view was incredible. But the feeling erupting in my chest wasn’t my beating heart or the view; it was the knowledge that I had navigated the unknown. I hadn’t taken a shortcut; I had earned it.

Sometimes I worry that we are building an educational system of helicopters. We are paving efficient roads to the answers. We think we are helping students by removing the “Dead Ends.”

But real learning is not a commute. It requires the friction of the terrain. It requires the willingness to stare at the wall, refuse the rescue, and find your own line to the top.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

From the top of Dinosaur Mountain, the Sacred Cliffs don’t reveal a path; they are a wall. But as my gaze scanned across the face of the sandstone, I wasn’t looking for a map; I was looking for an opportunity, what the environmental psychologist J. J. Gibson calls an affordance. Amidst the daunting verticality of the iron laden slabs, I spotted a jagged, four-tree-wide cut of conifers diagonally slicing up the southern ridge. This width was the key. Other narrow cracks offered similar lines, but they were fragile; all it takes is one ten-foot vertical cliff hidden in the shadows to stop a scramble in its tracks. The wider break suggested a more open architecture, offering an array of features, ledges, cracks, and roots, allowing for multiple ways around the obstacles. It was a sophisticated calculation: choosing the line with the most built-in redundancy. But the redundancy wasn’t just in the rock; it was in the connection. Aaron and I were already off-trail, deep into our preferred mode of wayfinding. In this terrain, we don’t use ropes. The only tether we have is the unspoken shared sounds feet on the rock, and glances of confirmation when a route goes through. The destination was less important than the immediate, unfolding conversation between our shoes and the ancient, rough-hewn conglomerate.

As the terrain tilted toward the vertical, our trail-bound approach from the valley was replaced by the intensity of the scramble. Here, on4th-class pitches, the world shrinks to the reach of your arm and the purchase of a thin strip of foothold. Every quartz nub and iron-stained “clast”: pebbles from a mountain range that vanished 300 million years ago, became a “set of moves.” There is a specific rigor to the flow; it is a mental dance where the distinction between “thinking” and “doing” collapses. We weren’t just two individuals climbing; for those forty minutes, we were a distributed system. You aren’t “applying” a theory; you are enacting habits built over many years and shared experiences. It is a way of being where your muscles recognize the friction of the sandstone before your mind can even name it. In this state, the mountain “talks back,” its rugged texture providing the silent feedback necessary to pull yourself higher.

When we reached the final pitch, I felt a strange discontinuity; I let go of the fear of retreat that haunted me throughout the arduous ascent, and felt almost like an observer as we crested the top of the rocky ridge. Seeing the horizon drop down revealing a new landscape created a magical sense of awe. But as I peered over the West aspect, the fear suddenly returned. I saw a 200-foot impossible to descend cliff. I worried that our adventure would end in a forced retreat down the East face, a structural dead-end for our emergent adventure. Looking for a new way through, I spotted a massive flake, a thin, detached slice of the mountain. In my eagerness to solve the puzzle, I violated the first rule of the scramble: I broke the line of sight. I moved quickly, slipping down the flake and out of sight before Aaron could see the line. The descent became a rupture in our shared flow. At the bottom of the flake, the exhilaration of the ridge was suddenly eclipsed by the hollow silence. I had lost voice contact with Aaron; this critical connection had been severed by stone. I called out to him but there was no response. In that uncertainty, the wilderness felt suddenly vast and indifferent. I wondered if it made sense to risk ascending back up the flake. I worried that Aaron might be in trouble. Those few minutes felt like an eternity. But then, a vibration in my pocket, a digital life line, bridged the physical gap between us. The silence was broken. Aaron had found his own line down, a different affordance for a different path.

When we finally reunited at the base of the jutting rock, the tension evaporated. We were no longer two isolated individuals; we were a team reunited on our mission. We found a well-worn social trail, an imaginary line etched into the collective memory of the mountain. We followed it the rest of the way to the summit of Green. We arrived exactly where we had intended, but through a “glorious accident” of our own making. It was a reminder that while the map can provide a goal, it is the wayfinding, the robust, redundant, and spontaneous choices we make in the middle, that define the experience.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

I am eight miles into a trail run, and my brain is suddenly on fire.

This is where the real work happens. Not sitting at a desk, but here, launching my frame forward, dodging rocks, finding my stride. I am breathless, but my mind is expansive. The peripheral trees, landscape, and ridgelines bring a striking clarity to my thinking. I can feel the connections begin to emerge like a mountain range being pushed up by two colliding tectonic plates.

I pull out my phone and dictate a chaotic stream of consciousness — a dozen half-baked ideas about education, AI, famous thinkers, and a reminder to take out the trash. I put the phone back in my vest, and as I crest the ridge, I feel my pace slowly accelerate on the flowy descent.

In my last post in this series, How Google Gemini Turned My Todo List Into a Prefrontal Cortex, I wrote about building a “skeleton” for my neurodivergent brain using AI. It was a breakthrough to finally have a place for everything. But a skeleton alone is just bones. It stands, but it cannot move. I realized I didn’t just need structure; I needed room to breathe.

The old list was a binary place: things were either completed or unfinished. Unchecked boxes were failures, small suffocations. I was trying to live my life on the exhale, constantly pushing, outputting, and contracting, without ever having a chance to breathe in.

When you are running, if you try holding your breath, you will collapse. The body requires rhythm.

It is the rhythm that allows the body to ascend the mountain and descend the other side. It is how cells exchange oxygen for waste and produce energy. My neurodivergent brain follows this same pattern.

My old to-do list failed because it was stuck in the exhale. It had no space for the run, no respect for the fledgling idea, no imagination for the wonder of expansion. It demanded convergence above all else, constantly finishing, constantly out of breath.

When I am out on the trail, I am not just running; I am exploring. I am bushwhacking through dense thoughts, cresting ridges of new ideas, and finding connections that weren’t visible from the valley floor.

But exploration without a map is fleeting. How many times have I had a brilliant insight, only to have it evaporate soon after?

This is where the shift happened. I stopped viewing my list as a punishment for my expansive thinking. Instead, I started viewing it as Navigation.

The “Inhale” is the discovery. The “Exhale” is the mapping.

Together they allow me to respect the way my mind works. When I feel expansive, I can ride that wave of inspiration. When things feel calmer, I can carve out time to negotiate what needs to get done.

When my ideas swirl in a chaotic cloud, projects feel impossible. I stare at the ambitious goal, and because I can’t envision the path, it looks like a vertical headwall. I freeze.

But I don’t need to scale the cliff. I need to find the Switchback.

My new system cuts the trail. It takes that terrifying vertical wall and carves it into a runnable grade. It organizes the raw energy of the “Inhale” into a path I can follow without becoming overwhelmed.

When I look at my list now, I don’t see a barrier. I see a trailhead.

To implement this “respiratory rhythm,” I split my digital brain into two hemispheres: The Studio and The Route.

1. The Studio (The Inhale)

This is where emergence lives. When I have a tangle of ideas, I first put them in writing. Then I move them straight to The Studio. This space is designed for collisions and slow burns.

The Studio is all about Expansion. As ideas develop, they move from left to right, gaining definition.

2. The Route (The Exhale)

If The Studio is the forest, this is the trail. This is where I go when it is time to converge and execute. When I sit down to work, I don’t have to wonder what to do. The map is already drawn.

• The Climb: These are the steep sections. They require motivation and hard work. I tackle these when my energy is high. Plan the meeting. Draft the grant.
• The Flats: These are the easy miles. Administrative tasks I can tick off even when I’m tired. Email colleague. Submit invoices.
• The Horizon: This is the view ahead. I can load things up here so they are ready to go. February Webinar. Summer conference.

The Route is all about Convergence. To get things done, I move them from right to left, narrowing the scope until I cross the finish line.

The AI is the bridge between The Studio and The Route.

When I have a messy, expansive idea in The Shed, say, a new project idea, and I feel stuck, I feed it to the AI and ask it to act as my trail crew.

I prompt: “Here is the raw stream of consciousness. Where might I go with this idea? What other ideas in my list does it relate to? Help me break this into Climbs and Flats. What do I need to fix in this idea?”

The AI helps with the transition. It takes the expansive energy of the “Inhale” and helps me find the actionable steps of the “Exhale.” It identifies the switchbacks so I don’t have to face the cliff.

I have stopped trying to force my brain along linear paths that do not exist for me. Instead, I am learning to listen to the rhythms that do.

We often think of agency as control, the sheer willpower to force yourself into the chair and grind the gears. But I am coming to believe that Agency is Modulation.

It is the ability to toggle between the trail and the desk, the dream and the details, the inhale and the exhale. Instead of fighting my mind’s natural desire to expand, I am learning to harness it. I am not conquering my brain; I am partnering with it.

My workflow is no longer a cage of obligations. It is a system that breathes.

It expands to capture the wildness of my trail thoughts, and it contracts to help me accelerate on the descent. It doesn’t just store my work; it keeps it alive.

The list is no longer a trap. It is just a map of the trail. And as long as I remember to breathe, I can keep running.

Originally published at https://gregbg.substack.com.

I stopped using AI to generate content and started using it to generate structure.

I am an education researcher, a lifelong learner, and I am neurodivergent. My work is focused on how humans can team with AI and how AI might support authentic human collaboration. So when I saw the new Gemini model was released, I thought it was time to jump in headfirst and see what collaboration with AI really feels like.

I have used todo lists most of my life to help my brain deal with the challenges of the neurotypical world we live in. People often expect me to focus on what is important, but my brain instead lands on what is interesting. I am not sure I could have made it this far without my lists. But lists are not easy to manage. They used to be on paper and there were thousands of them. Then I converted to digital, and branches would explode with information and then get lost.

Years ago, I found a tool called Workflowy. It has a clean look, the ability to collapse branches, and drag-and-drop functionality getting my ideas where they need to be. I have been using it ever since to manage my work, personal tasks, and passions. I should note that Workflowy is not designed specifically for task management. But tools that are don’t really work for me. They are too rigid and unaccommodating of all the ideas that pop into my head.

The Sprawling Digital Jungle

But that flexibility is a double-edged sword. For years, my Workflowy grew into a sprawling, digital jungle. I had bullets inside of bullets named “Process Later” where jumbled tasks, insights, and information went to die. My eccentric nervous system would first generate a massive branch full of ideas, and then abandon it for the next fascination. I had plenty of energy to explore, but I couldn’t keep it under control.

That is, until I started this collaboration with Gemini. I wasn’t asking Gemini to come up with the ideas, write my emails or help me do the research. Instead, I asked it to “help me design a room for my thoughts and tasks.”

I realized I didn’t need a better task manager; I needed a process manager.

Building the Infrastructure

I pasted my entire list into Gemini and together we came up with rules, processes, and new categories to help me upskill the tool. Some of the advice was predictable, such as clearing my INBOX daily and only putting a few key items in the TODAY header. But through the dialogue, we created a new category called THINKING STUDIO where I could put my brainstorms and nascent ideas.

We even figured out the “board” feature in Workflowy so that I could drag ideas from left to right as they matured. This freed up the ACTIVE PROJECTS category to hold only truly actionable items. Gemini showed me how to “mirror” nodes from a specific project into the Studio to develop my thinking without losing the context and missing deadlines.

The Problem of Identity

But I still had a problem. I am not just a researcher. I am an athlete, an artist, a father, and a writer. In my old lists, these identities fought for space and created conflict. “Practice photographing the light” would somehow get mixed in with “Complete grant report.” I felt my identity being pulled in opposite directions and frustrated that my cognitive support system did not honor my whole self.

Gemini suggested a new category called DOMAINS.

This is where I store the elements of my identity. It’s a permanent home for the “Artist” and the “Adventurer,” sitting right next to my professional aspirations. Now, when I have a thought about scrambling in the Rocky Mountains, it doesn’t clutter my work project; it goes straight to ADVENTURER. I don’t need to organize the mountain. The structure of the system lets me capture my ideas so I can find them later when it is time to act.

Inventing Coherence

With the structure in place, I faced a final hurdle: Productivity routines often feel cold and machine-like. But as a neurodivergent thinker, my energy isn’t linear; it’s a high-energy oscillation between philosophical tangents and suddenly remembering that I forgot to take out the garbage while taking a shower.

I didn’t need a taskmaster; I needed a grounding routine.

Together, Gemini and I built the “Daily Anchor,” a simple template that launches my use of the list for the day. It doesn’t ask “What do I have to do?” It asks, “Which version of myself is present right now?”

This simple prompt forces me to find coherence in an often chaotic reality. It stops the mindless momentum of checking boxes and forces me to pause and align my actions with my own narrative. If the “Artist” is leading today, I can follow that impulse without losing my footing. The system proves that the Researcher and the Photographer aren’t competitors fighting for resources, but collaborators in an emerging narrative.

The Cognitive Prosthetic

This experiment has changed how I think about AI and Human-AI teaming. There are so many articles about using AI to generate content, to write more words, faster. But maybe the true superpower of AI, at least for my neurodivergent brain, isn’t generating content; it is providing a structure where my human thinking can flourish.

My ADHD brain has plenty of engine, but often lacks the steering wheel. This collaboration became that steering wheel.

Gemini didn’t do the work for me; it scaffolded a space where my messy, complex, human self could actually thrive. I’m no longer trying to shrink myself to fit inside a list. Instead, we built a system that expands to fit me. It allows the Researcher and the Adventurer to coexist. I am no longer fighting my nature; Instead I am building the habitat that allows me to flourish.

Scrambling in the Colorado high peaks while learning what it means to find your way through life, one step at a time.

In the mountains, as in life, the path isn’t clear until you’re on it. You can prepare, read maps, study trip reports, but eventually, you have to make your way step by step, handhold by handhold. This story is about one such route and the lessons it revealed.

Aaron and I stood on the summit of Paiute Peak on a blustery early morning in the high Colorado Rockies. Paiute, a 13,000-foot mountain, offers sweeping views across the Indian Peaks Range. Though it was July, snow still clung to the high north-facing slopes, while the sun-exposed rock along the ridge was mostly clear. It was awe-inspiring to look north towards Longs Peak, the only fourteener in the vicinity. Longs dominates the southern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, a beautiful and formidable sight, and also the deadliest peak in Colorado with over 70 recorded fatalities.

Turning south, our gaze landed on Mt. Toll, which rose sharply from the ridgeline like a fortress of stone. Its undulating vertical cliffs looked nearly impenetrable. It was on those walls that Aaron had been rescued by a Black Hawk helicopter a year earlier. He was attempting a legendary challenge known as the LA Freeway, a 35-mile ridgeline traverse from Longs Peak to South Arapaho, with more than 25,000 feet of vertical gain and almost continuous scrambling and climbing. During that attempt, Aaron found himself on an exposed pitch well off-route. Instead of panicking, he made the difficult, but wise call to request help from Rocky Mountain Rescue. It marked the end of his ambitious attempt and, understandably, a major psychological setback.

We were returning to the very same section of LA Freeway to revisit that moment, together, on our own terms. We had read reports about an easier gully to reach the summit of Toll, described as third or fourth class terrain. Still serious, but nothing like the knife-edge climbing Aaron faced on his previous attempt. More importantly, it was within my limited scrambling skill set. Aaron is a seasoned scrambler who has completed the most technical routes in Boulder’s Flatirons. I, on the other hand, am early in my scrambling career and still uncertain whether I want to pursue the sport’s more intense challenges. But I suggested we return to his nemesis. What better way to confront one’s demons? And I’m always looking for a new challenge in the mountains.

Despite the fact that I could see no safe way up the rock wall in front of us, we started down the sharp ridgeline that connected Paiute to Toll. Using both hands and feet, we moved across slanted slabs and narrow notches, carefully picking our way forward. About halfway along, the ridge rose and led us to a relatively flat boulder field at the base of Toll’s steep summit block. That’s when the real route-finding began.

Aaron suggested we scout for a possible route up. We climbed together along a rocky channel, moving steadily into steeper and more complex terrain. Before long, we reached a vertical move that looked tricky. Aaron climbed up it with practiced ease. I paused to examine it more closely. While I probably could have made the move, I wasn’t confident I’d be able to downclimb it safely, and that’s a key consideration in any scramble. One of the most important safety measures is maintaining a route that allows for retreat. When exploring unknown terrain, the ability to backtrack is essential. I usually track my ascent with my phone’s GPS for exactly this reason, coming down often looks very different from going up.

While Aaron explored what was above, I decided to continue my exploration laterally across the slope. I skirted around a small snowfield and moved toward the rightmost edge of the boulder pile, following a rib of tilted rock. Just beyond it, I came to a sheer drop. But when I looked up the slope, I saw something promising: a narrow notch and an extended gully that looked climbable. A few easy scrambling moves gave me a clearer view. The gully rose steadily up and around to the right, avoiding the sheer cliff that had seemed impassable from below. I was convinced that I found the reported third class gully.

Aaron eventually came down and confirmed that he had spotted the same gully from above just before getting cliffed out. We then followed the route together and made it all the way to the summit of Toll.

There was no single moment in time when we discovered the route. It revealed itself gradually, over the course of the adventure. From reading trip reports to planning the traverse, from crossing the ridge to scouting the cliff base, the solution emerged step by step. We couldn’t have seen the gully without first making the traverse from Paiute. And even then, we had to keep moving, exploring, retreating, and trying again. Each small decision gave us access to new terrain, new perspectives, and ultimately, the route to the summit. That’s what I love about adventuring in the mountains, the multifaceted nature of the challenge, the unpredictability, the physicality, the problem solving. Every aspect of myself was engaged in the adventure and it required a level of trust in myself, in Aaron and in the mountains that can be hard to find anywhere else.

And maybe this is what route-finding teaches us about life. You can plan all you want, but the way forward is something you discover by doing, and life can only be navigated by living it. The summit is never separate from the scramble, and the hard parts aren’t necessarily obstacles, they are what give life its shape. All the parts are necessary components of the whole. And maybe this is a way to find joy and meaning in all those parts, even the ones we try to ignore.

When I recall this outing, I don’t think about the numerous scrapes or the intense exertion. What I remember is that moment when I crested the ridge and saw a cairn, three simple rocks, stacked by someone who came before. A sign that we were on the right path. I smiled without even thinking, overwhelmed by the feeling: we were going to make it. That moment is now etched into my memory.

And it’s why I keep going back. Because maybe, in life as in the mountains, we’re all just trying to find our way, one step at a time.

As I was putting things back in the tub I came across an aerosal can of all purpose adhesive that was left over from some task that I could no longer remember. As I held the can in my hand I had a sudden thought. I recalled that my trail running shoe upper had separated from the rubber sole at one place when I was out scrambling in the mountains recently. I took out the shoe, wiped the hole with alcohol and then sprayed in the adhesive. It didn’t hold together on its own. So I found a big binder clip in another tub labeled “stationary supplies” and pressed the flap of rubber against the fabric of the shoe and it held. An hour later I removed the clip and the shoe looked like new. Well it at least looked repaired. I was excited to give a bit more life to this tool for exploring the mountains.

The daily chores of cleaning my house don’t usually strike me as a topic for a writing piece. All I did was go through a bin of odds and ends and complete a repair that was not particularly important. But as I reflected on the experience I realized that this simple act was in fact inspirational. I have other bins of items in closets throughout my home. In fact I have so many items. I then considered of all of my physical possesssions. What if I thought of all of them in a hypothetical plastic tub. Similar to the “house repair” tub I sometimes forget what items I have and I miss opportunities for them to be useful in my life. The repairing of my shoe was a moment of serendipity, connecting something I already possessed to my love of mountain running. There was something wonderful about the way I just thought about repairing the shoe because I was holding the can of adhesive in my hand. It was was not only useful it was meditative. I want more of my life to be spent in this serendipitously connected way.

This makes me think about how much more thoughtful I am about my posessions when I am backpacking. I feel such satisfaction from the kit of items I bring with me on the trip. First I carefully select each item I will include and how I will use it. I consider the features, the weight, the bulk, and how each one will keep me safe and make the trip more enjoyable. When I find a way to eliminate an item by finding one that can do multiple tasks it brings a smile to my face. When I am on the trip I go through the items with regularity. In fact, each night I empty the entire pack and load each object back according to when I will need it on that day. When I need an item on a backpacking trip I often visualize where it is located in the pack and what I will do with it. I think some of the joy of backpacking is how simple and efficient this way of living can feel compared to the typical cluttered feeling of a house full of possessions. Being in touch with all my stuff feels meditative in the sense that I have less to worry about and more time to be reflective. I am wondering if there is way to bring everyday life closer to this aspect of the backpacking experience. Emptying that plastic tub and puting each item back one at a time brought me a little closer to the feeling I get when I do the same thing while backpacking. Now that I think about it, I should probably eliminate more of the items in my home. But, I would not want to be as ruthless as I am about my backpacking kit.

This gets me thinking about other items I possess. Similar to my physical items I have numerous folders containing documents on my computer. I could probably do something similar with them and consider whether I need all of them. Similarly I could go through my digital photos. Perhaps even the ideas in my mind are not so different from the items in the plastic tub. I am not so minimalist that I would want to live my whole like it was a backpacking trip. But, getting a bit closer to that mindset could be freeing. It could be that having too much clutter is getting in the way of finding those aha moments of inspiration. I plan to put more time into emptying all the real and imaginary tubs of things in my life and really think about what is important and what I need to hold on to.

I gently pull on the right break lever as I approach the cattle gate. It feels good racing along a smooth single track on my gravel bike, especially after the previous rocky section. I pass through the gate and then check my phone to make sure this is the right place to turn. I have been pushing the pace a bit and I wipe the sweat off my forehead. Ahead of me a gravel road extends into the distance sloping gradually downhill. I think back to a previous adventure when I climbed up that road and passed through this gate in the other direction. That was part of a fifteen mile loop called the Dirty Bizmark. Jed and I had ridden it a month ago on a beautiful spring morning.

Now it was practically summer, though still early enough to be cool. On my right a paved road nearly parallel to the gravel road extends down the same hill. My mind wanders back to the night before. I was sitting on the sofa thinking about this very turn. I had passed this spot on that previous ride, but I was about to cover new ground. I use an application called Gaia GPS to plan out my routes and then load them on my phone. There was no marked trail that easily connected me to the trail system in Rocky Flats, where I was headed. I switched tabs to the Strava App. That is where I typically post activities and see what other outdoor enthusiast friends are up to. It also has a feature where you can look at a heat map of tracks traversed by people on the platform. I saw a line that connected to the Rocky Flats gravel road only 50 meters down the marked paved road. The connector was not marked on Gaia, but people were obviously using it. With the drawing tool I marked the approximate path I would take.

I look out at the landscape and can picture my envisioned route. I even see a snaking gravel path on the hillside off to the right of the paved road. That must be the track I saw on Stava last night. I get excited anticipating how it will feel to corner those gravel turns.I hop back on and start pedaling.

Linking up different paths is a way to keep your adventure going. Whether you are traversing marked trails or a wide open landscape, an adventure is often a mixture of things that are known and unknown and you inevitably come to a juncture that needs to be navigated. What am I going to do at this intersection? How will I handle it? Who will I be in this moment? These moments of uncertainty are what make adventures in the outdoors the exhilarating experience that drives me to keep getting out there.

I am focusing on this specific moment in time, on this particular gravel ride, because it represents something important. In that instant I was using all of the tools at my disposal. Some of them were technological such as the Apps and the phone in my pocket. Some of them were physical like my quadraceps and my circulatory system that had to be ready for a 40 mile day with countless hills. Some were in my head: previous experiences, ideas of how the world works. These are some examples, but the list can go on and on. All of these things needed to come together in a very practical way as I decided what precisely to do next. Getting through adventures is challenging but it is also exhilerarating.

I have spent most of my life in classrooms. I have taught five year olds up through adults in various settings for nearly three decades. There is a connection between what happens in learning and what was happening for me at that intersection. Learning when it is inspired by curiosity is a journey, an adventure. It is full of wonder and excitement. But it is also very practical in the sense that you are navigating yourself through the learning experience. Framing learning in terms of spacial navigation is a powerful metaphor. Sometimes in school with all the testing and standards and other structures imposted, we lose sight of the realities of the student experience.

What if at that intersection someone came over and asked me question about how my bicycle works. Sure it might connect back to the adventure, it might even be really important somewhere down the road. But it doesn’t feel relevant right now. I am not having a problem with the functioning of my bicycle. What I am focused on at this moment is which road to go down. So the question about the bicycle is a distraction, It is getting in the way of my curiosity, of my excitement, of my adventure. Sometimes curriculum, standards and learning theory can feel like that question about the functioning of the bicycle.

What if we thought about learning as an adventure not so different from the way I was navigtating myself along this route? How might that impact the way we structure learning experiences for students? Can outdoor adventures like this give us insight into the student experience and how we should structure that experience? I don’t have the answers to these questions yet. But it sometimes feels that people talk about learning in terms of a list of things that are being worked on. A list of facts, a list of skills, even a list of performance expectations. Sometimes you do make lists when you go on an outdoor adventure. But the adventure itself is not a list. It is an experience that unfolds over time and emerges from the circumstances that take place. I want to explore the value of thinking about learning from this perspective. And when I talk about learning I don’t see it being limited to young people and classrooms. Learning is something we are doing throughout our lives. Learning might represent our most valuable and rewarding experiences during our lives.Let me know in the comments about your thoughts and reactions.