This is so very strange. The last two weeks have been quite rife with death but despite other sudden passings this was the most shocking to me. Richard was absolutely formative in how my worldview was shaped for the past 20 years and he often managed to put to words things that I’m still far too bad at expressing verbally myself (in fairness, Vineeto and Peter were also quite helpful in this regard).
While reading Vineeto’s response, I remember starting out thinking “how’s this going to work out without Richard” and during reading my whole world seemed to shift to “of course it’s like this, it’s always been supposed to be like this”. It’s very difficult to explain how my entire thought process changed, but it seemed fundamental at the time. There’s been a remarkable stillness for the past few days. Perhaps it’s because I’m on a short leave from work, perhaps it’s something else.
Also, this stood out to me in what Vineeto wrote (and I’m not sure if it’s self-evident to others, but to me it was both a discovery and a reflection of what I started doing the past week, for reasons I didn’t know at the time):
Thank you Richard for deciding to go public all those years ago, and thank you Vineeto for showing this woman that Richard wasn’t a freak of nature and that Actualism wasn’t a boy’s club. I wouldn’t have accepted it anyway 
, but it gave me less excuses for not taking the plunge… and the way things are currently headed, I think, in a weird roundabout way, the events that have transpired have blown the last few excuses to smithereens.