AaronRose.blog

  For Now Rivka Heller. Eighteen years old. Born and raised in Prague. She had always been quick with numbers—faster than the chalk, faster than the men who taught her. At the Charlesstadt Institute of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, professors learned to step aside and let her finish the proof. In 1938, one of them—an old man who smelled of dust and ink—had closed the door to his office and lowered his voice. “You have been noticed,” he said. By Berlin. He did not say why. He did not have to. Rivka understood before the sentence ended. Her parents disappeared soon after. No letters. No notice. Whereabouts unknown. Now she hid in the Alt Neu Shul with her younger brother, Chaim. Counting breaths instead of equations. Footsteps outside. This time they were not soft. The doors opened hard. Dogs entered first—two of them—low to the ground, muscles tight, noses working too quickly. Their handlers followed, boots scraping stone. An officer stepped in last, slower, deliberate. The do...

  I Think I'll Build in Private Lately, I’ve been thinking about building. Not just projects, but skills. Habits. Resilience. Ways of working. And I keep circling back to the same quiet idea: I think I'll build in private instead. The Current Drift There’s a strong pull right now toward: Building in public Shipping MVPs Narrating the process as it unfolds I understand why. There’s energy there. Momentum. Visibility. But I’m noticing something in myself as I learn new things and experiment with different workflows and tools. I think early-stage work doesn’t want an audience. It wants space. And privacy. Personal Skills Are Also “Builds” When I’m developing a new skill or habit, it behaves a lot like a project in its first weeks. It’s: Awkward Inefficient Full of false starts If I talk about it too early, something subtle happens. The work shifts from  doing  to  explaining . From learning to narrating. From experimenting to defending. None of that helps at the beginni...

  Soft Footsteps Silence pressed in around the Alt Neu Shul. Not the sharp silence of pursuit, but the long, suspended kind—where minutes loosen their grip and slide into hours without asking permission. The candles burned low. Wax pooled and hardened. Nothing moved. Then— A sound at the back of the synagogue. The door. It creaked as it opened, slow and cautious, as if the building itself were listening. Footsteps followed. Light. Measured. Not soldiers. Not jackboots. Softer. Chaim held his breath. A voice, barely more than air. “Chaim.” His heart stuttered. “Chaim, are you here?” Another step inside. “Bist du hier?”   (Are you here?) Rivka. “My sister,” he whispered, the words breaking apart in his mouth. “Rivi.” He came out from behind the pillar, blinking like someone pulled from deep water. For a moment she didn’t see him—then she did, and her hand flew to her mouth. They collided quietly, arms wrapping tight, foreheads pressed together. They shook. They cried. Chaim coul...

  Decisions, Decisions I'm running errands. Nothing heroic. Nothing urgent. The kind of lazy Sunday afternoon where the mind wanders more than the car does. I’m driving without thinking much about driving—letting muscle memory do its thing—when I stop at a red light. Next to me, a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon idles patiently. What catches my eye isn’t the Jeep. It’s the lettering. RUBICON. All caps. Clean. Intentional. Rubicon. The river. Julius Caesar. History has a way of hiding in plain sight like that. A word stamped on the side of a vehicle. A moment that once separated before from after. According to the old accounts, once Caesar crossed that river, there was no undo button. The die was cast. No reverse. No casual re-routing. For Caesar, that was a  big  decision. Sometimes that's the thing about big decisions—we only recognize them as big when we’re safely past them. Most decisions in life aren’t like that. Most are small. Mundane. Practical. What to buy at the store. Whi...

  Alt Neu Shul Night pressed down on the ghetto like a heavy cloak. The boy ran anyway. He was twelve, Jewish, barefoot on frozen stones, breath ripping in and out of his chest in sharp bursts. Somewhere behind him, boots struck cobblestone with the confidence of men who knew the city would betray him. Dogs barked. A voice barked louder. “Da! Dort!”  (There! Over there!) He turned once—only once—and that was enough. Black coats. Rifles. The pale flash of a flashlight sweeping walls already bruised by centuries of sorrow. He slipped into a dark alley. Left hand on the wall. Right hand clutching nothing. Everything he knew was already gone. The door of the Alt Neu Shul stood slightly ajar. He didn’t question it. He dove inside. The door closed with a sound too soft to be accidental. Darkness swallowed him. Not empty darkness, but thick—layered with prayers that had soaked into the stone over hundreds of years. He crouched behind a pillar, pulling his knees to his chest, trying t...

Thoughts on Daydreaming Some thoughts on daydreaming, attention, and not trying very hard I’ve always daydreamed. Looking out a window. Letting my eyes rest somewhere in the distance. Not thinking about anything in particular. Not trying to stop thinking either. Just… pausing. For most of my life, I never called this anything. It was just something I did. Later on, I was introduced to meditation. The formal kind. Eyes closed. Sit still. Focus on the breath. Clear the mind. I never liked it. Not because it was hard. But because it felt unnatural to me. Too inward. Too sealed off. Too much effort directed at  doing it right . What I noticed instead was this: When my eyes were open, when I was grounded in a room, when light was coming in through a window, my mind settled on its own. No instructions required. Thoughts came up. Then passed. Sometimes they connected to each other. Sometimes they didn’t. There was no striving. No outcome. No finish line. It was easy. Just a gentle widenin...

  How a Post-It Note Led Me to Self-Leadership A small experiment in writing things down — and taking things seriously It started, honestly, as a hunch. No system. No productivity framework. No app. Just a pen and a Post-It note — the large kind, the 3"×3" ones that are slightly annoying to deal with. I picked one up, wrote down four or five things I needed to do, and stuck it where I couldn’t ignore it. Here’s the important part: these were not new tasks. They were things I  hadn’t  written down before. Things I  hadn’t  done. Things I’d been quietly stepping around. Avoidance? Procrastination? Some low-grade mental friction I hadn’t bothered to name? I’m not sure. What I do know is this: Within a day, every item on that Post-It was done. That stopped me cold. I didn’t suddenly become more disciplined. I didn’t free up extra time. Nothing about my schedule changed. The only thing that changed was that those thoughts moved from my head to a small square of paper...