It started with Virginia Woolf. I picked up her book, so thin it was almost a long essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, at a used bookstore in Brooklyn, where every shelf is either Art or Films or Music & it makes me slightly self-conscious of how little I know about being “artsy”. But once I picked up Woolf’s book I couldn’t put it down. She was so articulate and yet funny, so fiercely critical but also full of life. I used to skip classic books because they were boring, but this book made me change my mind.
But something even more incredible happened. After Woolf, all I wanted to do was to read & write & code. There are few crafts in this world I want to get really good at, which happen to be reading & writing & coding. Reading Virginia Woolf is like seeing elegant code; every time I get a feel of what good work look like, I felt the urge inside me to create something. Not that it could be as beautiful, as original, as compelling, but it needs to exist. I guess seeing people being passionate about what they are doing helps me be more aligned in my path.
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Lately some magic shifted. I just woke up & knew what I needed to do. Yesterday I hopped on my bike and thrifted a beautiful wool sweater. Today I want to write, and so I go to our backyard and chug out words.
My heart has been feeling full in a different way, a more rounded, soul-ful way. I’ve come alive in midnight calls while doing grocery shopping, on a leisurely walk around Prospect Park sharing the values of community, in a cramped apartment on East Village learning about the cutting edge of neurotechnology, under the fierce sun of a Central Park picnic talking about our imagined future for climate. I have also come alive picking up herbs from Community garden, lining up for a local bakery in our neighborhood, refactoring my code for a PR review, and now, here, writing.
New York is a city of abundance. The other day Trang & I picked up a lamp on the street, & the day before that Allie & I got free paintings from this lady who was selling her house. People are in flux, constantly, all the time, and we were the lucky recipients of the things they left behind. Furnishing is hard, we have too much space (a rare oddity in the city), but piece by piece our house is becoming a home. Last night after dinner Allie & Trang pulled out an ukulele and a guitar, and so we had a spontaneous music jam session, which turned into us spinning around the kitchen dancing to the music of La La Land. Is this what domestic bliss feel like? A state of being I never want to leave.
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There is always a tug-of-war within me: the desire to do more, and the contentment of having enough. But lately I’ve not been asking myself that question as much. Maybe it’s because I’ve started viewing growth less as an exponential curve, but more like a spiral, a fractal. Not growth at the expense of everything else, but a slow, gradual blossoming in many different directions. Like seasons in a year, a winter of fallow followed by a summer of harvest. Like the redwoods we saw at Muir Woods, each year adding but an inch in diameter, and yet we still see them there, standing tall, unwavering after hundreds, thousands of years.
I’m reading Gödel Escher Bach, and the author is discussing Gödel’s mathematical theorem: there is no mathematical theorem that is both complete and consistent. In other words, within any formal systems, there will always be statements that can neither be proved true nor false. Or, reality is infinitely specific, infinitely beautiful, within each order of truth there exists a point beyond which it is unknown. When I read this I think of spirals, of fractals, of my apartment in New York, of redwoods, of new friends and old that I would spend a lifetime to get to know, of history, of how I got to be here and how the future is blossoming in a million different directions, of how if I stop questioning and start walking, I will be on the right path.
Reading ur words makes me feel a fluttering feeling of happiness and peace too Ha, and that gradual blossom(so beautiful) Much misses<3