Process Note: Fine-Tuning My Lent 2026 Political Reading and Writing Program

It's 7:00 PM EST on Saturday evening. We are almost at Quinquagesima, and I am fine-tuning my Lent 2026 political reading and writing program accordingly. I've unsubscribed from all of my Axios newsletters except "World Alerts," which I will see when I manage my email daily between 3:15 PM and 5:30 PM. That's just about the only obvious world news that should cross my desk during this retreat. But since I know this degree of filtering will be very hard to maintain, especially given the quite pressing state of UN Security Council affairs on multiple fronts, I am giving myself a safety valve. Every evening from 7:00 - 8:00 PM, I will do some deep reading and thinking about politics, after my evening meditation from 6:30 to 7:00 pm. If I find something coming up in my evening meditation that feels like an essential geopolitical responsibility I need to attend to, I will allow myself to skip the deep reading, get back on the computer, and assess the current state of affairs. At other times, I may want to get back on the computer from 7:00 to 8:00 PM just to do some political writing for a blog post like this one. That's fine, too. The key point is to keep my political time limited to about an hour a day during this retreat, and to spend most of that time reading, thinking, and writing at the deepest structural level possible for me right now.