Fourteen Months That Gave Birth to “It Is Up To You”

🎻 Music Credit: “It Is Up To You” by Embers To Stars (Daniel Carleo) — whose masterful cinematic soundscape elevates the message with depth, gravity, and reverence.

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In the winter of 2025, I made a choice that would have seemed mad to most: I withdrew from the world. Not partially. Not for a weekend retreat or a silent sabbatical. For fourteen months—four hundred and twenty-some days—I lived what can only be described as self-imposed solitary confinement.

Twenty-three and a half hours each day, I remained within four walls, with no television, no social media, no casual conversation, no escape into busyness or distraction. The only permitted interruption was thirty minutes daily, during which I would open a single, deliberate window to the world: one current event, chosen with care, to serve as the raw material for that day’s meditation. Then I returned to silence.

This was not punishment. It was not despair. It was devotion—the Stoic experiment taken to its logical extreme. I was building what Marcus Aurelius called the inner citadel: the one fortress no external force can ever breach. While the emperor stole moments between battles and decrees to write his private notes to himself, I cleared an entire year and more from the clamor of modern life to do what he modeled: to turn so far inward that the voice of reason and the whisper of Love became the only voices that mattered.

Each morning, after the thirty-minute news vigil, I would sit with the chosen event—not to judge it from above, but to let it judge me. What fear did it stir in my chest? What old judgment did it invite me to rehearse? What hidden invitation to courage, forgiveness, or surrender did it conceal beneath the headlines? Then the rest of the day unfolded in unbroken silence: writing, rewriting, praying, pacing the small room as if it were the whole cosmos. The 365 meditations in It Is Up To You were not composed in comfort or theory. They were forged in the fire of radical aloneness, where every illusion of control was stripped away, and only what is truly up to us remained standing.

Why did I do this? Because the world had taught me—subtly, relentlessly—that distraction is safety and noise is connection. I needed to unlearn that lie at the root. I needed to discover, as both the Stoics and A Course in Miracles insist, that the disturbance is never truly “out there.” It is always the judgment within. And with a single decision for love, every judgment can be undone.

“It is Up To You” is the fruit of that decision. The book is not polished philosophy. It is testimony—scratched out in the quiet hours when the only company was the truth I could no longer outrun. If this book reaches you in a moment of noise or pain or quiet longing, know that it was written by a man who chose to meet himself fully, without escape, so that you might find the courage to do the same.

The turning point is not out there. 

It never was. 

It is up to you.

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A Note On The Practice:

The thirty minutes I allowed myself each day were not for consumption but for contemplation. I did not scroll. I did not debate. I read one story—sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, sometimes mundane—and asked only: *How would Love meet this? How would Reason respond?* That single question, repeated daily for over a year, became the seedbed for every meditation in this book.

If you feel called to walk a similar path—even for a week, a month, or a single intentional day—I offer this gentle warning and invitation: the silence will at first feel like an enemy. It will show you every thought you have spent years avoiding. Stay anyway. The same silence that exposes the prison also reveals the open sky beyond its walls.

This book is the record of one man’s experiment in radical responsibility. May it serve as a companion for your own.

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