Wood Taught Me

Years earlier—long before cedar and fire—I had seen a tea-staining technique on YouTube. Steel wool in tea. Simple. Easy to overlook. I tried it anyway.

But the moment that stain touched oak, something deeper began. The tea oxidized. The steel wool dissolved. The oak reacted in its own way, darkening selectively, accepting color unevenly, resisting where it chose.

That’s when I realized:
the wood was talking back.

Not through sound, but through behaviour.

The video provided the spark.
But the material provided the education.

That was the beginning of co-cognition—thinking with something that has its own nature.

 All of this came from a deeper question I carried:

How much of a house can be built so its materials can return to the earth with ease one day?

Tea instead of chemicals. Fire instead of paint. Natural reactions instead of synthetics. I wasn’t looking for finishes.

I was looking for forgiveness, ways materials could serve, age, and eventually go back to the soil without resistance. This intention sharpened how I listened, observed, and adapted.

It turned every board into a conversation, not a command.

Recently, a friend, someone with the same computer science degree as me,
asked:

“How did you coin Two-5-Two? Where’s the data?”

He wasn’t doubting me.
He wasn’t challenging me.

He was questioning it the way we were trained to question:
logically, structurally, analytically. But that question made me pause.

Because the origin of Two-5-Two wasn’t in research papers. It was in cedar. It was in oak. It was in thousands of micro-decisions made while building, burning, staining, and listening.

His question didn’t shift my thinking, it surfaced what I had never put into words. Sometimes co-cognition comes from a material. Sometimes from a moment. Sometimes from a question.

One plank at a time, wood taught me:

pause before acting 

observe before assuming
adapt when the grain resists
treat behaviour as information
co-create instead of control
 

These were the earliest seeds of Two-5-Two,
long before I named it, and long before AI entered the conversation.

Cedar moulded my thinking. Oak refined it. 

After decades of building, experimenting, listening, and noticing patterns,
I’ve devised a three-depth co-cognition model.

I call them:

Co-Cognition+, ++, +++

But I will not define them here.

They weren’t created.
They emerged.
Your +s must come from your experiences, not mine.

Think of something you’ve worked with deeply:

wood
code
clay
fabric
metal
a craft
a sport
a relationship
or even one question someone asked you
 

Something that didn’t just follow your instructions—
it shaped the way you think.

Now ask yourself:

What is +, ++, +++
What were the three thresholds
where your relationship with something—or someone, transitioned from:

learning
collaboration
creation
and then into something you still can’t fully name?

That is co-cognition. And your +s will define themselves.

If two-5-two gives you anything, think of it not as a rulebook, but as a recipe.

A recipe to help you start cooking your own dishes of decisions, each with its own flavour, its own texture, its own story.

And when you cook, you co-cognize at various depths.

Whether it’s wood, a craft, a codebase, a conversation, or a kitchen, you are never creating alone.