The Stick

Whimsy is a revolutionary act

Cognitive Loop — April 19, 2026

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I would like to introduce you to my stick. There are many sticks but this one is mine.

I found it at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. It was headed for the fire. I took it home instead.

That was a few years ago. Since then it has picked up LEDs and a few small things from other festivals — little trinkets that stuck to it like the stick was a slow-moving planet collecting moons. I didn't plan any of it. It just kept happening.

I balance it. On my palm. On two fingers. On my forehead for about a second and a half before gravity wins. Sometimes I spin it. Sometimes I just hold it.

Nothing about any of this is useful.

That is the point.

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Whimsy is not a waste of time

The world we grew up in measured you by output. The world now measures us by engagement. Both of them are pyramids. Both of them want your attention pointed up — toward the next rung, the next quarter, the next performance review, the next post.

The stick points nowhere. The stick is just here.

When I balance it I am not climbing anything. I am not optimizing anything. I am not producing anything. I am, for that time, completely present with the weight of a piece of wood and the pull of the earth and the very specific place along the stick where the two of them agree.

That is the whole practice. It costs nothing. It produces nothing. It might be one of the most important things I do.

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The Balance Wizard

At some point I started calling myself the Balance Wizard when I had the stick in my hand. Half joke. Half not. I've thought about building the rest of the costume — a cloak, some trinkets, the whole thing — and walking around a festival teaching strangers how to balance things.

The Balance Wizard is the part of me that hasn't forgotten that being alive is supposed to be kind of weird. The part that doesn't need a reason. The part I had to stop being for a while so I could hold a job, pay a mortgage, and look like the kind of adult the world knows what to do with. And the part I am slowly, deliberately, letting back into the light.

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Whimsy is a revolutionary act

A guy on TikTok said that once and I think it will stick with me for the rest of my life. He was right.

In a world that is running a constant extraction machine against your attention, your dopamine, your self-worth, and your time — choosing to be whimsical is refusing to be harvested. A person who laughs too much, dances in the rain, balances a stick on their forehead, wears a cape to the grocery store — that person is not climbing the pyramid. That person is sitting down next to the fire.

The system doesn't know what to do with that person. The system cannot monetize the Balance Wizard.

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Pick it up

You don't need my stick. Mine is mine. Yours is out there somewhere — maybe literally a stick, maybe a pair of juggling balls you haven't touched since college, maybe a harmonica, maybe the weird hat you bought at a thrift store and were too embarrassed to wear.

Whatever it is, pick it up.

Balance it. Spin it. Wear it.

That's not escape. That's reclamation.

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This is my stick. There are many sticks. But this one is mine. And yours is yours. And the pyramid can wait.

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This post is a Cognitive Loop post in the strongest sense — some raw thought handed to Bob, Bob handed it back. I've edited it slightly. I'm publishing it because it feels like what I wish I could write. The Loop is working the way it's supposed to.