January 10, 2024
My 2023 began with a sobering reminder. After a year meditating on the fragility of life and the inevitability of death with mourners, widowers, caretakers, and other curious souls, our teacher left us with one final lesson. He warned us of an important distinction between two feelings we will inevitably run into on our journeys: resignation, and surrender. Resignation, a likely familiar feeling for many, is the experience that your will is being thwarted by reality. That no matter how hard we try to will it, it seems that reality will have its way and we have lost. It feels like giving up. He claimed that true surrender, on the other hand, is a very different thing. It looked more like ceasing to believe in this distinction, that your will is separate from reality, at all. You are reality. Where resignation feels weak, small, powerless - true surrender feels strong, enormous, powerful. There are pragmatic considerations, of course. To truly surrender at all times would be quite impractical, but to recognize our eventual mortality is to believe that at some point this surrender will come. No matter how much you will to live, reality will eventually have its way, and that ultimate reconciliation will happen. I saw it happen to my mom, to a neighbor growing up, to my friends’ parents as the years bore on. I read about it in the news in violent and horrific ways every day. I was curious, how much does it help to learn this lesson deeply sooner?
I began to consider it again from a very different perspective when I was unemployed and working on independent projects. Over lunch with a friend’s new grad sister, the discussion turned to how I began working on my own projects, and why I left my last gig. I gave a fairly trite explanation of being burned out, but she was ever inquisitive and followed up: “oh, how does burnout feel?”. After a moment's thought, I told her it felt like I had lost trust. Somehow, the things I was doing were not working, not helping me get where I wanted to be, and I had lost faith in my own direction. Next, she asked me what exactly this trust was that I had lost? I thought for a second, and told her that trust is knowledge. I had somehow lost a lot of self knowledge, and I was eager to spend time rediscovering it through the work I choose to do. I then urgently excused myself to the bathroom.
On my porcelain throne, I thought more about what I had just told her. Is trust really about knowledge? What would it mean for that to be true? Wouldn’t it be so fragile? I thought of all the times someone had surprised me, maybe made a mistake I didn’t expect them to, or shocked me with a behavior I didn’t know they had in them. What would it mean for me to say that my trust in them was lost, just because I had learned something new? Wouldn’t true trust mean that instead of losing faith in them this new learning evoked some curiosity? Maybe I’d ask some questions, eager to learn something new about how they see the world or what they may need support with. What would believing trust is knowledge mean for my faith in myself? Wouldn’t it imply that when I surprised myself I would lose faith, rather than treat it as a question, a provocation, an invitation to learn more? I considered the implications of having told an impressionable young person that something so fundamental as trust, was based on something so brittle (in retrospect she was clearly very curious as it was and would have been just fine).
When I returned from relieving myself, I urgently interrupted the conversation to correct my mistake. I told her what I knew for sure - that trust is not knowledge, that it cannot be so fragile, so fraught with doubt and uncertainty. I told her instead that I believed trust is much more like curiosity. It’s continuing to believe, to value asking questions, to feel motivated to learn more instead of shying away, to have faith in whatever it is you may learn. It would take courage, it would take faith, it would take love.
In the intervening year, my life has changed very much, and my faith has been tested time and time again. In New York I tried to integrate my interest in technology with art and expression, rather than just problem solving. I found it freeing and enlivening in ways I can barely begin to communicate, but I returned to SF feeling like my life here was dry and lacking meaning. Nonetheless, I had faith. And not the kind of blind, undiscerning, passive faith that leaves people stuck in situations that aren’t serving them. It felt more like a curiosity. A willingness to ask - what exactly is missing here? And is it something I could create for myself? What might that take? Might others even want it too, and help me make it real? I wanted that feeling again - a creative community of curious tinkerers, playing with reality and supporting each other to make their dreams real. I wanted it to feel like home. I wanted it to be full of exactly the equipment we needed to build the projects of my dreams, and I wanted it to feel communal. A few months later, I started MadSci, a nonprofit community makerspace. We signed a lease, filled it with gear, and recruited some members. We host weekly events with a thriving community, the business itself is self-sustaining, and it all started with the simple willingness to ask a question.
Just the same, I began to struggle personally with boundaries, noticing that as my 3rd group house started to die (as they all inevitably do, RIP Archive (http://archive.house 🥲) ), I couldn’t really disentangle how I felt about the situation from how others did. In the past, I would have simply vilified and marginalized my feelings, told myself I was too sensitive and just gone with the flow. But, now, I had faith on my side. What exactly was I struggling with? How do people normally deal with difficulties maintaining emotional boundaries? What does it mean to be comfortable being alone? I decided to live on my own for the first time in my life, and I’ve discovered the joy of my own company has other rewards. I appreciate my friendships more. Apparently it's quite important for me to know that I am spending time with my friends intentionally, not just by accident or out of obligation. I learned it's also important for me to have an extremely comfortable place for me to retreat to when I only marginally want to do something social. Before, staying home still held the risk I’d be inundated with social opportunity, so I might as well say yes to basically any social occasion. As cheesy as it sounds, I learned that saying yes to myself, and even to others, first means learning to say no.
I also got a new, very different, job. By complete circumstance and coincidence, I mentioned in a meditation circle that I’d started thinking of myself as less of a software engineer/AI researcher, and more as a creative technologist. All my favorite collaborators from NY called themselves the same, and I figured calling myself something was the first step to really believing it. That appeared to not just be figuratively true but also quite literally true. In that meditation circle, someone responded by offering me a job at her lab as a creative technologist. After some shoehorning of my prior work into an “interaction designer” portfolio, I got the gig, and it has been a complete whirlwind. Not quite positive, not quite negative, just an enormous reality check and opportunity to question why it is I wanted to focus my work as I did. It also raises questions of what it would truly feel like to take my quirky passions and try to capitalize them, to have them serve someone else and their needs. Is that really what I wanted out of my work and career? And how much does it matter for whom? It turns out, quite a lot.
Last but not least, I also fell in love. Yes, with myself, but also with someone else who I find so special that loving her exactly as she needs is the easiest thing in the world. It makes me look at all my past relationships and breakups and foibles with a kind of adolescent foolishness. How much does loving someone else really come from learning to love myself? Can I even trust someone to love me without first having faith in what they’ve signed up for? Can I be excited and curious about someone else before I’ve learned to be excited and curious about myself, the only person I’m truly stuck with until the end? How much time have I wasted on forcing and pushing something into being that really wasn’t good for either of us because I didn’t have this faith? I don’t know the future, but I know at the very least that I’ve set a new bar for how love can feel. That it can feel energizing and freeing. That I can feel renewed faith and curiosity in her every day. That I can feel excited to share a life with someone and relish the opportunity.
Faith has a life-giving quality to it. In a recent string of essays on AI safety by philosopher Joe Carlsmith he talks at length about the cruel indifference of nature. It’s something I think of often, knowing that it isn’t just that suffering is some small inextricable part of nature, but that it's infused into all of it, often in grotesque and violent and horrible ways. He highlights a prevalence of adults regularly killing and eating their own babies, across scales and species, as an unassailable example of this cruelty. Life does have this quality. It’s lush and vibrant, but also extremely fragile and horrific. I do not believe this a side of life we must only accept against our will because we are not yet powerful enough, no. It is the animus of life itself. Yin and yang. It takes an enormous faith to wake up every day knowing this, and yet that faith is encoded deep in our being. Every creature, fox or fern, lives a life with these risks and atrocities, and is born with the faith to wake up and face it every day. If you’re ever feeling unmotivated, watch this clip of a lizard running for his life from a pack of snakes immediately after being born.
Joe asks himself in his essays, what it is that defines “spirituality”? Especially if you ask that question independent of a theistic belief in God, it becomes extremely murky. People without it see it as something either trivial, like believing feelings are real, or delusional, like a deliberate lack of rigorous thinking in order to preserve certain beliefs. I think it’s actually just the kind of faith I’m talking about here. It’s making a choice to have unassailable curiosity. To never believe we have all the answers. It means taking a look at the cruel indifference of nature and deciding it’s worth loving and learning about anyway.
I see now that these habits: courage, faith, love, curiosity, trust, even gratitude, are actually all one and the same. You may notice even this writing is full of questions. What would it mean if this life were not something I were entitled to, born with and clinging to until the day it is forcefully wrested from me, but instead treated as just a gift? What would it mean, then, to look at that gift with open eyes and wonder? Thank you, whatever miracle it may have been that gave me this thing, I will treasure every moment of it I can get. I will spin it around in my hands, delicately unwrapping it and investigating its every crevice. I will wonder how it is that this part works as it does, and will wonder what another part is even for. I will decorate and accessorize it and make it my own. I will treat every pleasure with the kind of curiosity I treat a cake made for me by a friend. Wow, how did you make the icing so creamy? Is that nutmeg I taste?
Just the same, I will recognize all the things I don’t like about the gift, and remind myself that I didn’t ask for it. At no point was I asked to describe in excruciating detail what kind of life I wanted, and so I am under no obligation to enjoy every aspect. I can treat every pain and hardship and confusion as an invitation, and I am welcome to check in with myself as to how and whether I even want to engage. I learned to have faith in the gift itself nonetheless. Somehow even the greatest hardships always come with beautiful lessons. At the very least, I get a delectable opportunity to sympathize and connect with others on the same journey.