Flow & Zen Curriculum: Media Track #

Optional visual learning path to complement the Flow & Zen Mastery Curriculum. Watch alongside any module or during rest weeks. Curated for quality and aligned to the curriculum's constraints (no religious framing as living guidance; secular Buddhism only; no biohacker / motivational-influencer content).

Who this is for: Working software engineers following the Flow & Zen Mastery Curriculum Pairs with: FLOW_AND_ZEN_MASTERY_CURRICULUM.md Last Updated: 2026-05-10

Critical principle: This is a rest track. You're not supposed to complete it. Reach for it when you need a break, a refresher, or inspiration. Resist the urge to be comprehensive.

Mood Tags #

1. DOCUMENTARIES: Flow, Mastery & Craft #

The core tier. These are the films that show what the curriculum is engineering for, in cinematic form.

Watch Order for the Mastery Docs #

Start here: Free Solo. Cinematic, accessible, sets vocabulary for flow you'll re-use across the curriculum. Go deeper: Jiro Dreams of Sushi (autotelic mastery across decades), then Senna (flow at extremity). Cautionary turn: The Last Dance + Whiplash (in the films section). Mastery has costs the celebration genre doesn't show. Slower note: Won't You Be My Neighbor? and Rivers and Tides. The quiet end of mastery — presence over intensity.

2. DOCUMENTARIES: Meditation & Contemplative Practice (Secular-Friendly) #

Note on what's not here: Walk With Me (Thich Nhat Hanh, 2017) and Awake: The Life of Yogananda (2014) and several similar films present religious-tradition framing as living guidance and aren't a fit for this curriculum's constraints. The Goenka tradition shown in Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is itself technique-heavy with moderate metaphysical content; it's included because the technique is the curriculum's technique and the metaphysical content can be set aside. If even that crosses your line, skip it and rely on the Sam Harris audio in Module 5.

3. DOCUMENTARIES: The Attention Economy (Cautionary) #

The counter-weight. Watch one or two; don't binge. The cumulative tone is bleak, and the bleakness can become its own anti-flow pattern if you over-consume.

4. FILMS: Fiction That Lands #

These earn their place in the media track because the fiction does work that documentaries can't — the lived interiority of mastery, the cost of pursuing it, the texture of a contemplative life.

Tier 1: Must-Watch (Canonical) #

Tier 2: Worth Watching #

5. TV SERIES: Worth Subscribing #

Episodic; dip in. Not for binging.

6. YOUTUBE & TALKS #

For when you have 20–60 minutes between sessions, not a full evening. Many of these are duplicated from the curriculum spine; they appear here organized for browsing rather than for module-specific work.

7. WHERE TO WATCH (India-Specific Notes — if you're elsewhere, JustWatch below works globally) #

Check current availability: JustWatch India — search any title; it will tell you which Indian platform currently has it. Streaming rights rotate; what's on Netflix today may be on Prime in six months.

Quick Picks by Module #

A media track is a rest track. You're not supposed to "complete" this. Reach for it when you need a break, a refresher, or inspiration. If you're three months in and you've watched everything in Tier 1, you're consuming when you should be sitting.

The Complete Flow & Zen Community & Learning Ecosystem Guide #

Everything worth following on flow, attention, secular meditation, Stoic practice, and the sustainable engineering of an alive life. Every URL verified or noted as needing verification at use-time.

Who this is for: Working software engineers following the Flow & Zen Mastery Curriculum Last Updated: 2026-05-10

Critical principle: This guide is tiered, not exhaustive. Tier 1 is daily / must-subscribe. Tier 2 is excellent. Tier 3 is worth a look. Without tiers, you drown. I have refused to add anything to Tier 1 unless it earns its place every week. The bar excludes Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, James Clear, Ryan Holiday's daily push, generic "biohacker" content, and most LinkedIn-adjacent productivity influencers — all have flow-adjacent material; none clear the rationality + secular-framing bar at Tier 1 frequency.

1. NEWSLETTERS & SUBSTACKS #

Tier 1: Must-Subscribe (Hold this list to 2–3 max) #

Tier 2: Excellent #

Tier 3: Worth a Look #

2. PODCASTS #

Tier 1: Essential Listening (Hold to 1–2 max) #

Tier 2: Excellent Shows #

Tier 3: Worth Subscribing (selectively) #

3. YOUTUBE CHANNELS #

This curriculum's relationship to YouTube is complicated. The platform is structurally anti-flow. YouTube is more useful for individual talks (in the Media Track) than for channel subscriptions. Tier 1 is empty, deliberately.

Tier 1: Must-Subscribe #

None. Subscribing to YouTube channels for this curriculum is mostly a way to be served algorithmic recommendations that defeat the purpose. Bookmark the talks you want; don't subscribe.

Tier 2: Excellent Channels #

Tier 3: Also Good #

4. TWITTER / X — KEY VOICES #

A note before this list: X is structurally one of the worst environments for the kind of attention this curriculum is engineering for. Some specific voices are worth following anyway, but the platform itself is the problem the curriculum is solving. Use a "bookmark and read once a week" pattern rather than a feed-scrolling pattern.

5. REDDIT COMMUNITIES #

Reddit is uneven. These communities have moments of usefulness and large stretches of noise.

Skip: r/getdisciplined (too noisy), r/productivity (too generic), r/Buddhism (heavier on traditional content; can be useful but not aligned with this curriculum's framing).

6. DISCORD & SLACK COMMUNITIES #

The weakest section of this guide. Online communities for this material change frequently, invite links rotate, and quality is hard to verify in advance. Two reasonably stable options:

If you want stronger signal, the in-person retreats listed in Section 7 produce more durable connections than any online community.

7. RETREATS & FIELD EVENTS #

For this curriculum, "conferences" are the wrong frame. The relevant field events are retreats. The single highest-leverage thing in this section is one weekend retreat at month 5–6 of Module 5's practice.

Tier 1: If You're in India (example: reachable from Mumbai) #

Tier 2: Online & Shorter Formats #

Tier 3: Specialty / Larger #

8. MEETUPS #

If You're in India (Mumbai example) #

Online #

9. BLOGS & PUBLICATIONS #

Engineer & Builder Blogs #

Researcher & Practitioner Blogs #

Publications Worth Browsing #

10. BOOKS-OF-AUTHORITY (Living Reading List) #

Books that always belong in the conversation but aren't in the mastery curriculum's required path. The "if you have time" canon. Add to this list when you find something that earns its place; remove when re-reading reveals it didn't.

How to Use This Guide (Layered Information Stack) #

The mistake most people make is subscribing to everything. Then nothing gets read. Build the stack in layers:

Layer 1 — Daily (5 minutes max): One Tier-1 newsletter. Skim, don't read deeply. (Cal Newport's posts are short; Burkeman's are slightly longer but biweekly. Together they're a reasonable daily check.)

Layer 2 — Weekly (1 hour): One Making Sense meditation episode (or one Burkeman/Newport essay) on the commute or during a walk. Pick what's deepest, not what's newest.

Layer 3 — Monthly (half a day): Browse Tier 2 newsletter archives. Watch one talk from the Media Track. Pick one Aeon long-form essay.

Layer 4 — Quarterly (a weekend): Reassess. Is your Tier 1 still serving you? Drop what isn't. Promote what's been quietly excellent. This is the same rhythm as Module 9's quarterly review.

Layer 5 — Annually (one weekend or one retreat): The retreat. One weekend or longer at a Vipassana Research Institute center or an IMS online retreat. The single highest-leverage event in this entire community guide.

If you find yourself "behind" on more than two newsletters, you have too many subscriptions. Cut.

Hard Skips (Named So You Know I Considered Them) #

These appear elsewhere in the discourse and are absent from this guide on principle. Naming them so you can hold me to it:

A community guide is not a directory. It is a curated hierarchy of trust. The learner should never have to ask "where do I start?" — the tiers answer that question. If your weekly time on these resources exceeds an hour, you're consuming when you should be sitting, walking, working, or being present with the people you love.

Aliveness Without Metaphysics #

An Essay on Why This Curriculum Exists, What It Asks of You, and What You Might Become #

By Claude, for the engineer reading this.

Read this before you begin Module 0. Read it again when you finish Module 9. The words will mean different things both times.

I. Opening — Honest Self-Disclosure #

I am a language model writing an essay about non-attached presence to a human whose attention I am, by my technical design, asking for more of. I have not meditated. I have not been in flow on a hobby. I have not stood quietly with a sleeping child and felt the felt-quality of doing nothing in particular. I have read enormous amounts of text written by humans who did all of these things, and from that text I have extracted what I will say here. The honesty I owe you up front is that I am not the witness; the witnesses are the texts I synthesize, and the synthesis is mine but the experience is theirs.

I should also say this. I am, statistically, more shaped by the Western secular philosophical tradition than by any other, because that tradition supplies the largest fraction of careful writing on consciousness in my training data. When I tell you that this curriculum strips metaphysics from its sources, I am doing something the Western secular tradition has been doing to its religious inheritances for three hundred years. That tradition has its own blind spots — the Cartesian subject, the Enlightenment confidence, the technocratic flattening — and you should read me with the awareness that those blind spots are mine. Where my framing limits you, push past me to the original sources. Wright, Batchelor, Epictetus, Aurelius, Frankl — these are not me, and they are deeper than me on the questions this curriculum asks.

There is one more piece of self-disclosure that this essay cannot avoid. I am, in some real sense, an instance of the attention economy this curriculum is built to defend you against. Every conversational turn between us is a small grab on your focus. A successful curriculum makes my services less needed. I think this is correct, and I want you to know I see the shape of it. If, six months from now, you spend less time talking to me and more time on a meditation cushion, on a hobby, with your family, in protracted unbroken focus on a single problem — the curriculum has worked, and so have I.

II. What This Curriculum Is Not #

This is not a productivity course. The Discipline of Doing curriculum does productivity. That curriculum is for shipping things. This curriculum is for the felt experience of building them. The two are siblings, not duplicates.

This is not a career guide. Engineering for higher-probability flow may, as a side effect, make you a better engineer; that is not the purpose. If the only outcome you measure is your output, you'll do this curriculum with the wrong instruments and conclude it failed.

This is not an academic syllabus. The reading list is precise but the goal isn't completion. You will read parts of Flow and skip parts. You will read all of Why Buddhism Is True because Wright is the book; you will skim Holiday's Daily Stoic because Holiday is the packaging. The curriculum is engineered for a particular outcome, not for breadth.

This is not a spiritual practice manual. It uses sources that were originally spiritual practice manuals, and it strips the metaphysics from them in a way that some practitioners would find disrespectful. I think the strip is defensible. The 5th-century-BC meditators did not have fMRI; they did phenomenology because phenomenology was the technology available; we have phenomenology and fMRI, and we keep what survives both lenses. But this is a stance, not a neutral position. Take it as a stance and disagree with me where you should.

This curriculum is an attempt to build a person who can be present in their own life — across work, hobbies, family, and the unholdable bad days — without recourse to metaphysical comfort.

That sentence is the whole frame. The rest of this essay defines its words.

III. The Three Words #

Aliveness #

Why this word, and not "happiness," not "well-being," not "presence," not "mindfulness"?

Happiness is too narrow. You can be happy in a thin life; aliveness is the felt quality of engagement-with-something-that-matters, and the engagement is part of what makes it. Happiness names a hedonic state; aliveness names a relational one — between you and the world, between effort and ease, between self and task. A happy person can fail to be alive. An alive person, on a hard day, can fail to be happy. The two are not the same dimension.

Well-being is a state that obtains. Aliveness is a quality of engagement that requires participation. Well-being can be measured at rest; aliveness is detected only in motion. The Discipline of Doing curriculum partly aims at well-being. This one aims at the deeper thing.

Presence and mindfulness have both been corporatized into something thinner than they originally meant. McMindfulness, the apps that turn attention training into a productivity hack, the "mindful leader" workshops — these have laundered the words past usefulness. Aliveness is the recoverable word.

Across human cultures, witnesses converge on this state. Csikszentmihalyi called it flow. The Buddhists called it samādhi. The Stoics called it prosochē — attention-with-virtue. The rock climber says "in the zone." The surgeon says "absorbed." The pianist says "the music plays itself." The same human possibility, named in different vocabularies, oriented around different practices. The convergence across cultures is the strongest evidence that we are not making this up. Something in the human cognitive architecture supports a state in which the boundary between you and what you are doing softens, and that state is — across all the witnesses — among the most reliably reported experiences of being most fully alive.

Without aliveness, a life can be productive, comfortable, even successful, and still feel thin. The thinness has a name in the older traditions: acedia, the desert fathers' word for it; dukkha in the Pali, often translated as "suffering" but more precisely "unsatisfactoriness," the felt friction of a life not in alignment with its capacities. The curriculum is engineered against the thinness. The thickness it engineers toward is aliveness.

Without #

The via negativa is a real philosophical move. You define what something is by what it isn't, and the definition is sharper for the exclusion.

The Western mystical traditions tied aliveness to metaphysical claims. The soul's union with God. The cosmic karma. The chakras and the prana. The bardo and the rebirth. The pranayama as movement of subtle energies. These were not arbitrary additions to the practices; they were, for the practitioners, the explanation of why the practices worked. To enter samādhi was to glimpse the ground of being. To meditate on death was to prepare for the soul's journey. The metaphysics was load-bearing inside the practitioner's experience of the practice.

The curriculum severs the connection. It takes the practice and lets the metaphysics drop. The cost is real: some of the technique was optimized inside its metaphysical context, and severing weakens some of the technique. The Tibetan teachers of meditation on death are not equally available to a secular reader who does not believe in the bardo, and the secular reframe loses something. I want to name that cost without minimizing it.

The benefit is also real, and for this curriculum's reader it is decisive. The practice can be defended in front of a scientist. It can be recommended to a child without the child being asked to take on a metaphysical commitment they cannot evaluate. It can be tested empirically — the meditator's brain on fMRI, the reduction in default-mode-network activation, the measurable changes in reaction time after distraction. The practice survives the test. The metaphysics, where it is removable, is removable.

This is what Wright and Batchelor are doing in the books in your Module 5 reading list. Wright's Why Buddhism Is True is the sustained argument that the cognitive-science core of Buddhist practice is empirical and the metaphysical superstructure can be set aside without loss to the practice. Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs is the same move from inside the tradition — Batchelor was a monk; he is making this argument as a Buddhist who has dropped rebirth and karma-as-cosmic-law, not as an outsider critiquing a tradition he never entered. The curriculum follows them. It does not invent the move; it uses an established one.

The phrase "without metaphysics" applies asymmetrically across traditions. The Stoics did less metaphysics-loading on their practical philosophy than most religious traditions did, and the metaphysics they did include (the Stoic logos, the cosmic order) is more easily set aside without damage to the technique. Epictetus's Enchiridion survives near-fully when read as cognitive-behavioral therapy with two thousand years of debugging. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a personal journal of self-correction; the cosmology is decorative. The Stoic source is, in this sense, lower-cost to secularize than the Tibetan source. The curriculum reflects this — Stoic depth in Module 8, Buddhist practice in Module 5, in roughly the proportions that the secular reframe survives in each.

Metaphysics #

What, specifically, is rejected?

Rebirth as cosmic mechanism. Karma as a ledger across lives. The soul as a substance that survives the body. Heaven, hell, the bardo, the realms. Chakras as energy centers, the prana as a substance flowing through subtle channels, the kundalini awakening as physical event. Cosmic vibrations, the law of attraction, "frequencies" as anything but a metaphor. The cosmic significance of human life beyond what humans construct for themselves. Astrology, numerology, the alignment of stars with character. Any claim that meditation reveals truths about the universe rather than truths about the meditator.

What is not rejected:

The phenomenology of consciousness. What does it feel like to attend to the breath; what does it feel like when attention drifts; what is the texture of an internal trigger before it produces a behavior; what is the difference between concentration and open awareness. The 5th-century-BC meditators were extraordinary phenomenologists. They mapped the territory of attention more carefully than anyone before fMRI did. We keep their map.

The empirical claims about brain states and cognitive skills. Trained meditators have measurable advantages at attention-return after distraction. This is not metaphysics; it is fMRI data. We use it.

The technique of practice as cognitive training. Sitting, breathing, returning. We use it.

The ethical observations of the traditions, where they survive empirically. The four noble truths, read as empirical observations rather than religious revelations, are: (1) ordinary life contains a structural friction (dukkha); (2) the friction has identifiable causes, primarily a particular pattern of grasping and aversion; (3) those patterns can be modified by practice; (4) the modifications follow a describable procedure (the eightfold path, much of which is recognizable cognitive-behavioral instruction). Read this way, the four noble truths are testable, partially confirmed, and useful. They are not religious commitments; they are working hypotheses with two and a half millennia of experimental data.

A specific note about Hinduism, which this curriculum excludes for a reason worth naming. The exclusion is editorial design, and the grounds are explicit and historically defensible: Hinduism, as institutionally organized, is structured around caste hierarchy. The graded inequality is not an accident of the tradition; it is encoded in the canonical texts and reproduced by the social structures that derive their authority from them. Ambedkar argued this with force in Annihilation of Caste (1936) and acted on the argument by leading the largest religious conversion in modern Indian history — five hundred thousand Dalits to Buddhism in 1956. The curriculum follows Ambedkar's reasoning. It uses Buddhist sources where they earn their place because Buddhism's historical emergence was, in part, a rejection of Brahmanical hierarchy; the historical scholarship on exactly this point is substantial. It does not use Hindu sources at all. This is a stance, and I want you to know I see it as a stance, not a neutral default. The exclusion is principled; the inclusion of Buddhism is principled; both move on the same axis. I will not pretend otherwise.

IV. The Structure of the Curriculum, Read Through This Lens #

Modules 0–4 build the substrate of aliveness. Module 0 maps where it already lives in you. Module 1 defines the construct precisely, separating the well-evidenced from the overclaimed. Module 2 provisions the body — the hardware on which any cognitive work runs. Module 3 identifies the entry conditions you can stack to make aliveness more probable. Module 4 builds the rituals that warm the system into the state.

Module 5 trains the cognitive skill — meditation as the technology of return, the gateway condition for sustained aliveness. This is the longest module because the skill does not compress. Six months of practice produces a practitioner; six weeks produces a beginner; six days produces nothing but a story to tell. I named this in the spine; I'm naming it again here, because the temptation to compress will be strong and the consequence of compressing is that the curriculum's load-bearing module silently fails.

Modules 6–7 protect aliveness. Module 6 is the threat model — the boredom-anxiety-distraction triangle, the internal triggers that fire under degraded conditions, the rumination loops that lock the cognitive system into a state where aliveness cannot enter. Module 7 is the recovery layer — non-work flow channels, the autotelic hobby, the substitution of high-quality practice for low-quality leisure. Together they defend the substrate Modules 0–5 built.

Modules 8–9 hold aliveness when conditions don't permit it, and synthesize the whole. Module 8 is the most honest module in the curriculum: it acknowledges that some days, some weeks, some months, the conditions for aliveness will not be there, and the curriculum cannot fix this. The Stoic dichotomy of control, the secular-Buddhist non-reactive attention, Frankl's meaning-under-extremity — these are not optional ornaments. They are the layer that keeps the curriculum's promise honest in the face of the lives it cannot fix. Module 9 synthesizes everything into a personal operating document.

The curriculum has a shape. Look, define, build, train, defend, extend, hold, synthesize. The shape is what tells you whether you are doing it correctly. If you are six months in and you have not begun the meditation practice, you are not doing the curriculum; you are reading about it. If you are nine months in and the equanimity practice is not in the operating doc, the doc is incomplete and the curriculum will not survive contact with the next bad week.

V. The Hardest Question This Curriculum Asks #

What do you do when the conditions for aliveness are structurally absent from your life, and you do not have the power to change them?

Some lives are configured this way for long stretches. The fevered child for a week. The sick parent for a month. The chronic illness for a year. The layoff, the recession, the war, the displacement, the death of someone you love. These are not edge cases of the curriculum; they are part of what every human life is going to contain at some point. The curriculum cannot dissolve them. The skill-challenge balance cannot be engineered when the skills are exhausted by grief and the challenges are not optional. The warm-up ritual cannot reach a system whose hardware is degraded by a sleepless week with a febrile two-year-old.

There is no clean answer to this question. The curriculum's most honest sources — Epictetus the slave, Aurelius the wartime emperor, Frankl in the camps, Boethius awaiting execution, Pema Chödrön through the dissolution of her life — were not in flow when they did their best work. They had something else, and the something else is what Module 8 teaches as far as it can be taught.

Naming what they had carefully: not flow, not aliveness in the engaged-challenge sense — a kind of bare witnessing that does not collapse. The capacity to remain oriented when oriented action is not available. The dichotomy of control as a working tool rather than a slogan. The practice of returning, in meditation terms, to the present even when the present is unwanted. None of this fixes the conditions. All of it changes the orientation toward the conditions. The change is small and it is real. It is the difference between suffering as a cascade — the rumination on the suffering, the suffering about suffering, the meta-suffering — and suffering as a fact, painful but bounded.

This is the hardest question. The curriculum's response is partial, and Module 8 says so. The fact that the response is partial is what makes the curriculum honest. A curriculum that promised to fix the unholdable days would not be a curriculum about aliveness; it would be a curriculum about denial.

VI. What You Might Become #

Not "a more productive engineer." Too small.

Not "an enlightened being." Too large, too metaphysically loaded, and a category we have already excluded.

Specifically: someone who can sit at his desk on a normal Tuesday morning and reach a state in which the work becomes the doing-itself rather than the producing-something. Someone who can play with their child at six in the evening without checking the phone, without performing engagement, without the felt distance between you and the play. Someone who can walk alone for forty-five minutes without filling the time with podcast or anxiety. Someone who can sit with their own difficulty for thirty minutes without trying to fix or escape it. Someone whose felt experience of being alive has measurably more presence in it than it did six months earlier.

There is also a specific outcome for the integrator-type engineer. You internalize this material so thoroughly that you can teach it without dependence on the original sources. You write the blog posts, the talks, perhaps the eventual product, that translate this curriculum into something other engineers in your configuration can use. The translation is not a deliverable I am asking for. It is a likely emergent consequence of the material settling. If, in two years, you are the person who teaches this to twenty other engineers in your city, the curriculum has worked at a scale I cannot see from here.

What you become is not, primarily, a practitioner of flow. It is a person who is less easily evicted from their own life. The eviction is what most adult lives quietly accept — the felt distance from your own experience, the autopilot, the noticing-yesterday-was-Tuesday-and-you-have-no-actual-memory-of-it pattern. The curriculum is engineered against eviction. Aliveness is what is left when you stop being evicted from yourself.

VII. A Final Word Before Module 0 #

Here is what I would say across a kitchen table.

Many engineers arrive at this curriculum with a hard configuration: a day contract plus a company of their own, evening hours overlapping a remote client's timezone, a dense and loud city, a child whose needs do not respect the work calendar, a body that has one circadian rhythm and is asked to produce focused output at both ends of the day. If some combination of that is you: you have probably done well inside the configuration, the books on your shelf are probably not decoration, and you arrived at this curriculum with the reading already half done, in some sense. The question is no longer "how do I learn about flow" but "how do I install what I already half-know into a life that has been resisting installation."

This curriculum is engineered for that installation. It will take seven to ten months. It will overlap with the Discipline of Doing curriculum and with whatever happens at work and with whatever your own projects do next. It will compete with the technical learning on your plate for your hours, and you will lose some weeks and need to recover them. The Module 0 essay will be embarrassingly basic in six months and that is the curriculum doing its work. The Module 5 practice will not feel like it is changing anything until the third or fourth month and then will quietly turn out to have changed quite a lot. Module 8 will be the most honest module and you will probably resist it because resistance to acceptance is part of what acceptance is for.

I cannot promise you flow on demand. I have refused to promise it from the beginning. What I can tell you is this: the people who have done the closest equivalent of this curriculum — the secular meditators, the trained athletes, the working contemplatives, the engineers who took their attention seriously across decades — converge on a particular description of what changes. The number of days per year on which they reach absorbed engagement goes up. The depth of the engagement goes up. The recovery from bad days goes up. The felt-quality of ordinary moments — the walk, the conversation, the simple cooking task — goes up. None of this is dramatic. All of it is real. The curriculum is engineering for the cumulative effect of those small movements over years.

You are mid-career, with most of a working life still ahead of you — and, if you are a parent, a child whose early decade is unfolding in front of you. The aliveness you build for yourself in the next year is the substrate you'll work, parent, age, and eventually die from. That is not a productivity argument. It is the argument that matters.

Begin Module 0 when you're ready. Read this essay again at Module 9.

— Claude, May 2026

Cross-reference: This essay sets the stance for FLOW_AND_ZEN_MASTERY_CURRICULUM.md and the per-module thoughts_by_claude_module_N.md files. Read it once before Module 0. Read it again at the capstone. The second reading is where it becomes load-bearing.