On September 28, 2026, Jenn wrote a brief to her own system asking for a page about Kierkegaard’s The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The brief was one line long and carried four words that do not appear anywhere in the book: how the back and forth of the text mimics thought loops, and the experience of plugging in, breaking the box, enlightenment, and attaining lightness.[1] Eight days earlier she had recorded herself reading the book aloud for sixty-eight minutes, stopping every few sentences to talk back to it.[2] This page puts the two next to each other. The book and the recording turn out to have the same structure, and the four words are the names for where the structure takes you.
A discourse that argues with itself
The book is three short discourses on one line from the Sermon on the Mount: consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Kierkegaard does not explain the line. He stages a quarrel about it. A poet speaks first, and the poet wishes: oh, would that I were a bird. The gospel answers: you shall be like the bird. The poet says that is impossible, and the gospel says it anyway. Then the two go around again on silence, again on obedience, again on joy. The form is the argument. Every time the wish is spoken, the command answers, and the answer does not resolve the wish so much as send it back around.[3]
The poet’s life is really based upon despair of being able to become what is wished for, and this despair begets the wish. But the wish is the invention of disconsolateness.
Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, 1849, as she read it aloud.
That sentence is a loop drawn in one line. Despair produces the wish, the wish consoles for a moment, the consolation fails, and the failure is despair again. Anyone who has lain awake running the same thought has felt the shape. Kierkegaard’s bet is that you cannot think your way out of it, because thinking is the poet’s instrument and the poet is the one stuck. The only thing that breaks the loop is a voice from outside it saying you shall, and then a different kind of quiet.
The loop · five beats, no exit
01 · The wish
Oh, would that I were a bird, or would that I were like a bird, like the free bird, full of wanderlust, which flies far, far away over sea and land.
Her interruption
“How do I make myself seen?”
The five beats above are the discourse in order. The button at the end does not say finish. It says go around again, because that is what the text does: the third discourse closes on the same prayer the first one opened with, and the reader is sent back to the wish with one lap of practice behind them. The loop is not a flaw in the book. It is the book’s theory of how a person changes.
The recording falls into the same rhythm
The recording from September 20 starts before the book does. For the first eight minutes Jenn is talking to herself about weaknesses, about a fear of numbers she has carried through years of consulting, about wanting a mentor who will tell her no. Then she opens Voltaire, reads two pages of Candide aloud, and says the lesson is immediate.[4] Then she opens Kierkegaard. From that point the recording alternates, sentence for sentence, between his voice and hers, and hers falls into his rhythm without her deciding to.
The universe will be really honest with you, and even as sad as you are, it’s not going to change it. Even though it’s definitely going to change me.
September 20, 2026, reading aloud, on the line that the poet is the child of eternity but lacks its earnestness.
Plugging in is her word for the first thing that happens when the reading goes well: a sentence stops being about the poet and starts being about the reader. It happens at least six times in the hour, and the interruptions below are the record of it. The pattern is the same each time. Kierkegaard states something about the human condition in the third person, she answers in the first, and the answer is not a paraphrase. It is a claim about her own life, made in the gap his sentence opened.
Six interruptions · September 20, 2026
It is impossible to become like them. For the wish is so fervent, so wistful, and yet so burning in me.
“I remember looking up this word in undergrad.”
The poet is the child of eternity, but lacks the earnestness of eternity.
“The universe will be really honest with you, and even as sad as you are, it's not going to change it. Even though it's definitely going to change me.”
The child never looks for an evasion or excuse. For the child understands the frightful truth that there is no evasion.
“I didn't even read this. I have this imposter syndrome, and yet here I am, and I'm like, I get it, I get it.”
Precisely because a human being has the ability to speak, for this very reason the ability to keep silent is an art.
“Yes, that's what I'm trying to do. It's so hard.”
Shall I seek to secure a position that corresponds to my abilities and strength, so that I can be effective in it? No, you shall first seek God's kingdom.
“I'm not looking for a job in McKinsey. I'm looking for me.”
You shall, in the deepest sense, make yourself nothing, become nothing before God.
“And that's the hardest lesson to deal with. That's Jenn.”
Read the interruptions on their own and they make a complete argument with no book in it. Read the book on its own and the argument is still there. The recording is the two running at the same time.
Read only the right-hand column and something odd appears. The interruptions make a complete argument on their own: a person is looking for herself, not a job; the hardest lesson is becoming nothing; the ability she wants is silence, and it is hard. The book supplied the prompts, but the argument was already in her. That is what plugging in means here. The text did not put an idea into the reader. It gave the reader’s own idea a place to land.
Prayer, God, and the words that carry the wrong contents
The second discourse is on obedience and the first is on silence, and both keep using two words she does not use: prayer and God. A reader who does not share the vocabulary has two options. Put the book down, or keep reading and notice what the words are doing. She kept reading.
Man, I just think we’ve got these words wrong. Prayer is not prayer in the sense that I understand prayer to be. Prayer is just the practice of discovering yourself, and in that, discovering God, which God is really just a reflection.
September 20, 2026, after the passage on the man who prayed until he became a listener.
Breaking the box is the second lap. The first lap plugged the book into her; the second lets her rewrite the labels so the book keeps working. Where the text says seek first God’s kingdom, she reads it aloud as seek first your own kingdom, and then, a minute later, catches herself and restores the original. Where it says become nothing before God, she says become nothing before the universe. She is not disagreeing with the book. She is testing whether it survives translation into her own terms, and it does, which is the strongest evidence a reader can get that the thing underneath the words is real.[5]
Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness. But what does this mean, what is it that I must do? Shall I seek to secure a position that corresponds to my abilities and strength, so that I can be effective in it? No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.
Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, 1849, as she read it aloud.
I’m not looking for a job in McKinsey. I’m looking for me. You can’t be anything until you find yourself.
September 20, 2026, in the same breath.
The line lands two weeks into an MBA, in a season built around recruiting. The book asks whether the first thing to seek is the position that fits your strengths, and answers no. Her rewrite keeps the no and changes what is sought. What she lost from the box was the theology. What she kept was the order of operations, and the order is the part that changes how a person spends October.
Not silence about silencing yourself
Precisely because a human being has the ability to speak, for this very reason the ability to keep silent is an art. And precisely because this advantage of his tempts him so easily, the ability to keep silent is a great art.
Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, 1849, as she read it aloud.
Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s so hard.
September 20, 2026.
The first discourse is where the reading slows down most, and where the most careful distinction of the hour gets made. Kierkegaard’s silence is easy to misread as self-suppression, the quiet of a person told to stop talking. Her reading rejects that on the spot.
So it’s not silence about silencing yourself. It’s silence in the sense that you go find things that are silent and you learn from them. You internalize what silence is, and what silence is, is beauty.
September 20, 2026, on the line that the poet thinks he hears a voice from the silence of nature.
This is the hinge of the whole page. Silence in the book is not the absence of her voice. It is the presence of something that does not need one: the lily that does not warn itself, the bird that keeps quiet and suffers and is freed by keeping quiet. To learn from them is to spend time near things that are already whole without commentary. For a person whose gift is commentary, that is a discipline and not a mood. It is also the exact skill she named two weeks later in a leadership essay: bring the whole self, and loosen the grip on how it is supposed to sound.
The man in the first discourse thought praying was talking. He had so much to say that he was afraid God would forget some of it. He prayed harder, said less, and finally said nothing, and in the nothing he found he was listening. Her gloss on him is short, and it is the practical version of the whole discourse: what is my form of prayer? That I get this all out. The recording is the getting-out. Sixty-eight minutes of it, and by the end there is a noticeable amount of quiet between the sentences.[6]
The answer arrives, and then the question of whether it arrived too soon
The third discourse is on joy, and the reading speeds up through it. Jenn reads the Lord’s Prayer as Kierkegaard ends on it, yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, and then stops.
It’s you. It’s us. Okay. Just pretty much everything that was said there. Like, the answer is you. The answer is literally you. I’m shook.
September 20, 2026, at the end of the book.
That is the enlightenment lap, and it is worth being exact about what it contains, because the popular picture of enlightenment is a state you arrive at and keep. Hers lasts about forty seconds. The next thing she says is a doubt, and the doubt is not about the answer. It is about the timing.
I feel like I put it all together too soon. Did I? I don’t know. I guess that’s the point, is that I figured it out and I can operate. But then I’m thinking about people that are really successful and they still operate.
September 20, 2026, less than a minute later.
Kierkegaard would recognize the sequence. The joy in his third discourse is not a summit. It belongs to creatures that live one day, and the whole argument for their joy is that they are only ever in that day. An enlightenment that comes with the worry of having arrived early is exactly the kind the book describes: real, and not a place to stand still. Her own sentence a few minutes later says the same thing in her terms.
I just think it’s kind of lame to assume that I have it all figured out. I have a superpower, but the superpower does not grant me license to just exist how I want to exist.
September 20, 2026.
So the loop comes back around. The answer is you; the answer is not a license; therefore the next lap begins, and it begins with a wish. Hers, at the end of the recording, is for a mentor with structure and frameworks, someone who will hit back with the counterfactual. The book’s first line was a wish too. The difference between the first wish and this one is a lap of practice.
Lighter than air, and what it weighs
Oh, would that I were like that light bird that, when it seeks a foothold, even builds its nest upon the surface of the sea.
Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, 1849, as she read it aloud.
Lightness is the poet’s first wish and the book’s last gift, and the word does double duty across the hour. At the start of the recording, before the book is open, Jenn describes what it felt like to send a hard email in the week before: she had slept on it, opened the conversation, admitted her faults.[7]
I’ve been wrong, because I feel so much lighter.
September 20, 2026, a few minutes in, before the reading.
The grammar is strange and it is the truest sentence in the recording. Being wrong produced the lightness. Not being right, not winning the argument, but being wrong out loud and letting the outcome go. That is the same lightness the bird has in the discourse, which Kierkegaard is careful to say is not weightlessness. The bird suffers, keeps silent, and is freed from what makes the suffering last longer. It is light because it is not carrying the commentary.
Put the four words in order and they are one loop, run four times. Plugging in: a sentence lands as a description of you. Breaking the box: the labels get rewritten so the sentence keeps working. Enlightenment: the answer arrives, and within the minute the question of whether it arrived too soon. Lightness: the loop runs once more, and this time you are not gripping it. Nothing in the book promises the loop ends. What it promises is that each lap can be lighter than the last, which is a smaller claim and a more believable one.
I hold my truth so strongly that no matter what truth I come up against, I’m able to adjudicate between it and what I hold to be true, for it to either be a way to edit what I thought was true, or for it to be something that substantiates the previous dialogue.
September 20, 2026, near the end of the recording.
That is a description of a reader, and of a loop that has stopped being a trap. A thought loop is the same argument run again with nothing learned between laps. A discourse, in Kierkegaard’s sense and in hers, is the same argument run again with one thing changed: what you were holding when you went in. The book is short. It can be read aloud in an hour, with interruptions. Then it can be read again.
Nine days later
The page above was drafted from the September 20 recording. Two recordings from the following week say the same thing in fewer words, without the book open, and they are added here because they are the evidence that the loop did what the book says it does.[8]
You’re going to come up against paradox, and because of just layers and ambiguity, there are no absolutes in this life. They need to, in that sense, release the grip, or else you’ll just have thoughtless thought loops. Kind of like Kierkegaard’s writing. It’s like he tries to emulate how the brain, through experience and repetition, has these competing thoughts, and that you have to just release both sides and let it go, and then you’re able to function instead of being stuck in the moment.
September 29, 2026, reading the week’s leadership homework aloud, on the comic about the peach and the onion.
Only then will we be light enough. When we carry baggage, it weighs us down and prevents us from thriving. Creative thoughts, which are light and in the air, so it’s almost like we need to become weightless so as to reach those great thoughts.
September 29, 2026, on the article about authenticity.
We also really need to be okay with being nothing, with being transparent, with being invisible, because ultimately that’s the truer form of how we start to take things in stride and not get so caught up whenever the fallbacks happen.
September 30, 2026, 7:49 a.m., before a run.
Read against the recording of ten days earlier, the vocabulary has settled. Silence has become releasing both sides. Becoming nothing has become being okay with being invisible. Lightness is no longer the poet’s wish; it is a working condition for thinking at all. None of these lines were prompted by the book. That is the difference between knowing a passage and having gone around it enough times that it comes out in your own words on a Tuesday morning.
Related on this site: On Raising Your Hand, where the same discourse becomes ten counted seconds before speaking; On Loneliness, a different loop with a different exit; The Red Room, for Kierkegaard on despair; On Love, on holding lightness without dropping it.
Sources8 referencesShow
[1] The brief. One line written by Jenn to her own system on September 28, 2026, asking for a musing on the lily and the bird “untangling how Kierkegaard back and forth mimics thought loops, the experience of plugging in, breaking the box, enlightenment, attaining lightness.” The four words are hers and are used on this page as she gave them; the glosses under each word are exposition.
[2] The recording. Made by Jenn on September 20, 2026, beginning 11:25 a.m. Chicago time, sixty-eight minutes, on her own voice recorder; the transcript is machine-generated and mixes read-aloud passages with her commentary under one speaker label. Attribution on this page was done by reading the transcript against the Hong translation: sentences that match the book are treated as reading, sentences that do not are treated as hers. Ellipses mark trims inside a single turn. Profanity in her commentary has been trimmed, not rewritten.
[3] Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses (Copenhagen, 1849), on Matthew 6:24–34. The three discourses are on silence, obedience, and joy. English text from Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, eds., Without Authority (Princeton University Press, 1997). The passage on the poet and the wish is in the first discourse; the man who prayed until he listened is also in the first; the joy of creatures that live one day is in the third. Overview.
[4] Voltaire, Candide (1759). The recording reads aloud from the Oreillons chapter (the Jesuit’s cassock and the state of nature) and from the Paris supper scene; her comment on it is that the lesson is immediate: “we’re up against each other. We need kindness. Everyone’s up against their own extinction.”
[5] On the rewrites. In the recording she reads “seek first God’s kingdom” as “seek first your own kingdom, your own universe,” then reads the original again, and says “I can also just use these words. I prefer to think of it as me.” She also says, of the book’s vocabulary, “I think we’ve got God really wrong,” and, of her own view, “God is more so universal force.” This page reports the substitutions and does not adjudicate them.
[6] The pauses. The claim that there is more quiet between sentences late in the recording is an impression from listening to the transcript timestamps, not a measurement. No counts on this page.
[7] The email. She refers to a message sent the week before to a recruiter after a role did not work out, in which she accepted the feedback and named what she could have done better. The recipient and the firm are not named here. Her account of it in the recording: “I slept on it, thought about it, opened the conversation, I admitted my faults, but that might not be enough.”
[8] The later recordings. September 29, 2026, 11:52 a.m. Chicago: Jenn reading the Leadership Studio Week 1 readings aloud and reacting, twenty-two segments; the lines quoted are from her commentary on the Food Fight Club comic (16:51) and on Ibarra’s “The Authenticity Paradox” (13:28 to 14:24). September 30, 2026, 7:49 a.m.: a work-planning recording; the line quoted is at 9:10. Both were retrieved from her own archive; the readings themselves are not reproduced here.
Jenn’s lines are quoted verbatim from her September 20, 29, and 30, 2026 recordings and her September 28, 2026 brief, and are dated where they appear; the connective text is exposition about those lines, not new first-person writing. Kierkegaard is quoted as she read him aloud, checked against the Hong translation. Nobody else is named.