Recently, I posted about a fiction book that changed my life. Within minutes, the replies flooded in: "can u pls summarize?" "what's the main point?" "tldr?"

And I responded. But I felt frustrated.

Because it felt like asking someone to summarize a kiss. Like requesting the bullet points of grief. Like demanding the key takeaways about laughing until your stomach hurts.

I think about my grandmother, who tells me the same story about her childhood in Rajasthan and makes me cry every time. Not because the story changes, but because she does. Because I do. Because the telling is alive, shaped by whatever grief or joy we've carried into that particular afternoon. There's no fast-forward button on her voice. No way to skip to the "good part" or extract the lesson. You have to sit there on the scratchy couch, smell the chai bubbling in the kitchen, watch her hands move as she speaks, let the story work its way through you like medicine you didn't know you needed.

The things that matter most — love, wisdom, skill, character — resist compression for the same reason great literature does. They exist in their full particularity, in the accumulation of small moments, in the patient repetition that looks like nothing from the outside but is everything on the inside. The athlete knows that strength comes from the ten-thousandth repetition, not the first. The parent knows that trust builds through bedtime stories read with the same enthusiasm for the hundredth time. The artist knows that mastery emerges from the willingness to fail beautifully, repeatedly, until failure teaches you something failure alone can teach.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about the critical importance of "dwelling," which is the practice of remaining present with something long enough to let it reveal itself fully. In his 1955 "Memorial Address," he distinguished between what he called "calculative thinking," which "computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities" and seeks to extract useful information, and "meditative thinking," which "does not just happen by itself" but requires us to "dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest" and allows itself to be transformed by encounters with mystery.

We've become a civilization of calculative thinkers, brilliant at extraction but tragic at dwelling. We want to know what Interstellar is "about" without sitting through the slow burn of its revelation. We want to understand what makes a marriage work without doing the daily, undramatic work of loving someone through their worst Tuesday.