The streets around us are dark and quiet, but we whirl around them a nucleus of yelling and music, the energetic nonchalance of youth in glowing orbit around us. The Utah roads, in their empty intersections and lonely highway ramps connecting a whole foreign world between the miles of our trip, I do not know and neither do we as we make u-turns and cut across lanes to correct deviating routes. The songs we blast I barely know, harkening back to the childhood and time spent with friends I remember only secondhand from cycling workouts and rallywagon rides. The people, too, are wanderers like I've become, far from the paradisiacal bubble I called home, united for a moment in our journeys. But isn't that all there is to life anyways? I feel unrooted but grounded, wandering but still. I feel alive in a most empty way, or perhaps empty in a most alive way. We return and I lie on the carpet, the sugar of a popsicle from the run fighting a momentarily winning battle in an inevitably lost war against the late hour.

coconutmilk chocolate almond bar

![](/blog/2021-01/present.jpg)

"The most poignant way to live life is to anticipate that emptiness before it comes and have that fold back in on itself and treasure it while it's happening. Realize you're in the good old days while you're living them."[^moments]

Upper Management of *The Phillipian* CXLIII sent out their farewell emails last night. The ritual felt too soon when I was doing it last year, and this year it feels even more so, my removed perspective compounded with the shortening effects of quarantine. The experiences of UM CXLIII were very different from those of UM CXLII on many levels, but one sense of awe is the same: that of not only a tenure, but an entire scholastic journalistic and community service career, an integral part of one's identity, passing by just like that.

I was looking at my Spotify Favorites Fall/Winter 2020/21 playlist. I didn't make a new one in winter because the time felt continuous. But now, looking at the songs on the list...they're not the songs of the present. They're the songs of a time that has passed by. Fall/Winter 2020/21 has passed by.

It's now spring. Spring. Time of renewal, healing, fresh starts, a breath of warmth sweeping through to lift the world up from its pristine and crystallized winter.

Spring will mark a full year for me away from Andover's campus. For all [I thought my connection with Andover was severed](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/06/07/a-love-letter-to-the-non-library-andover-commencement-commentary.html), I realize I still depend on it a lot in terms of my identity. There is no other environment, community, even physical place that I feel is my home in the same way.

I've spent a lot of my energy in the present. Pushing myself to [be a builder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hZr6BvC1Z0), to relentlessly prioritize, to cut out everything that doesn't matter to me. The [huge amounts of change and turnover](https://preview.mailerlite.com/v1x0k0) of all sorts happening around me has contributed to this state of being very much in the present.

But now things are just stable enough, and just enough of the past is resurfacing,[^past] to balance the present out and put things in equilibrium, or maybe limbo.

I miss the past but I don't long for it. I'm excited for the future but I don't feel compelled to rush into it.

These moments aren't particularly memorable. They don't grow roots like low points do or sprout flowering branches like high points.

But in the moment, it's quite nice.

[^moments]: Capturing these moments is the intention of posts tagged [#moments](https://www.samsonzhang.com/blog/moments) on my blog.

[^past]: an hour ago, a few bags of Chinese groceries unexpectedly arrived at my Community House in Utah, ordered by my mom. Yesterday I spent an hour in a critical theory book club, listening to the connections drawn to International Relations classes and random other readings, a familiar trickling of the atmosphere I so enjoyed at Andover...

present

7 PM tonight was an important time for a friend of mine.

This was someone who was very college-oriented, but also straight up the smartest person who I'm close friends with, who I look up to or at least consider my equal in everything academic, STEM or humanities (her common app essay would have put winners of essay competitions to shame). Her college focus wasn't the kind of narrow-sighted focus so many kids waste away their lives and vitalities on. Hers had her do everything right, keep touch with reailty, find lots of fulfillment, pursue lots of hobbies and projects, and stay on a graceful, unbroken arc of joyful excellence.

A grade below me, last year she pestered me constantly about my college apps and decisions, the former of which were poorly done and the latter of which were accordingly lackluster. This year, going through things herself, her attitude was 100% changed. The kind of self-doubt and anxiety that affects any humble person heavily invested in this institutional path came into play as if she hadn't a thought that she was so good at everything she did.

And, in a wave of all of my other friends getting deferrals from EDs from less selective schools, at 7 PM tonight, she found out that she got into Harvard.

As a reject far from having accepted my rejection ("don’t mind me just trying to ignore my own pain of college rejections that happened just a year ago, ouch they still hurt," a friend in my grade sent in a group chat recently), I'll admit, there was some part of me that was rooting against her. Rooting against the belief that there was an optimized, systematic way to approach college apps, that more research or more effort would have netted me better results; rooting against the belief that my failure, and the failure of all my other friends, are ultimately our fault, regardless of whether or not it matters, regardless of whether or not we had the parental support, whether the time and effort made sense to put in -- we tried to hit a goal, and we failed, and it was our fault, because someone else was able to succeed with the same resources.

"Do you have faith in me?" my now Harvard-bound friend asked at one point. "I'll give you all the faith my cynical heart can summon," I replied, supposed cynicism a mask for my own insecurities that lay underneath.

When she excitedly told me her decision, a part of my ego definitely shattered. It was a sequence of happenings I had seen enough times to not be surprised by for more than a few moments. A friend described a similar reaction to her deferral just days ago -- at first, feeling fine about it, until a close friend of hers had a good result, at which point all came emotionally crashing down. The same happened to me last year when a best friend had good ED results, me crashing particularly strongly because I was at the peak of my passion projects at the time, and was suddenly made to question whether they -- my passions, my very sense of self and being -- were in fact sabotaging my life.

Same phenomena now. My friend's positive decision seemed a confirmation that all of my identified reasons for failure were excuses, and I had simply been sub-par as a person.

And whatever, discussions about false meritocracy and the value of higher ed and tying it to your own self worth can go on for days. I didn't write this blog post to talk about that.

I wrote this blog post, and I brought up all the conflict above because, a few hours later, something magical happened.

At 11 PM, I got around to watching a reaction video my Harvard-bound friend had recorded and sent me. I wasn't sure what to expect; my own reactions last year had been carefully stifled the whole way through, more and more so as time went on. This friend wasn't typically externally overreactive.

The reaction in her video, though, was anything but contained. The anticipation was expectedly high as she navigated to the portal, but the reaction caught me entirely off guard. It was explosive in its joy and excitement. In the cheers, the jumping, the unending laughter that rung through the air, there was an energy -- a life force -- that transcended all else. It filled my weighed-down mind and battered-up self-image and then wiped them away entirely, leaving nothing but a sheer happiness, a pure humanity, a mode of being one and the same with existence that was impossible to counter, impossible to think about, impossible to subconsciously drag down, only to live and to feel.

"A friend of mine had a good decision today," I sent to a group chat full of deferred friends.

> my first reaction was like ah shit my life is a wreck
>
> then they sent their reaction video and there was just so much sheer joy and happiness and a blinding light overcame the darkness of being lost in life and i was just happi

Settled down a little from the high -- its traces still lingering if I think to the memory -- a thought comes to my mind.

> just a random unexpected perspective
>
> remember and appreciate humanity
>
> in an application process that often so brutally destroys it
>
> love yourself and love life and seek joy

We're human. We're alive. We love and are loved. We feel happiness.

We abstract upon these core ideas endlessly, losing sight of them in 90% of our lives, but at the end of the day, they are the things that matter — and sometimes, the reminder that they do can come from the most unlikely of places.


coleg

Browsing through music in Spotify — unsatisfied by a racing Mendelssohn piano piece — I find my way to a playlist of Chinese EXO songs (inspired to search for by Riku having Jay Chou in his top songs of the year). My Chinese isn't good enough to understand the lyrics unaided, so I Google song lyrics quickly and follow along with occasional songs.

Quickly I find lines that thrill me: "走向谁都未知的那个明天" in El Dorado is one of them I sent to a group chat in excitement. It's the little flairs with language — "那个明天" — that are so exciting, at once familiar and new. The language is the one I grew up speaking, but it contains the lyricism and beauty of language that I've only associated with English, exposed only to the textbook and homey spoken Chinese that I was.

Other songs excite me in different ways. Tempo, the first Chinese EXO song I looked up the lyrics for, was just fun and exciting, mildly badass: "I said don’t mess up my tempo / 这是我偷心的武器 / 别乱了我节奏 独一无二的 One two three..."

Sing For You caught me off guard with a feeling not just of excitement, but also of nostalgia. At some point in our lives, our music taste is shaped more by nostalgia for what we grew up listening to rather than the thrill of new discoveries, a friend once told me. I had never heard this song before. The lyrics are comparatively straightforward and un-flowery. But its warmth and softness, the vulnerability in the lyrics...it's a flavor of Chinese I haven't experienced since early, early childhood, when Chinese was my only language and thus the capsule for the full extent of my self and emotion, before a rift opened between my family and the world around me, the past and the future, my heritage and my life. [^threebody]

[^threebody]: Some of my favorite books from last summer were Liu Cixin's *Three Body* trilogy, which I read in translated English. Multiple friends of mine — some international, one ABC like me — read it, and speak about it, in Chinese. It's a strange feeling being so close to Chinese culture — I'm much luckier than the countless ABCs who struggle to even speak in Chinese — and yet so far from being able to truly take it in or be a part of it. This is only exacerbated by my father being a published Chinese sci-fi author 😛 My relationship with my Chinese heritage and identity is one I've yet to really process and understand...

走向谁都末知的那个明天

![](/blog/2020-12/peppercorn.png)

I rake a fork through the small glass container in front of me and find a peppercorn, a small black ball amidst the green and brown of my meal. With a piece of tofu, I scoop it up and deliver it to my mouth.

My teeth crunch down on the cooked but still gritty peppercorn. For a moment I await in anticipation. At first I think it is the taste of the spice that I await for, a sharp, pungent numbness that grips strongly and reassuringly at the inside of my mouth, but when it arrives I realize that it is something else.

The dim memory of a small dining room. A humble golden chandelier casts a warm glow over the white-clothed table below. Sizzling, chopping, and the running of water emanate from a kitchen just out of sight.

The flavor of meat with that unmistakable peppercorn tinge fills a mouth that has been vegan for years, void of the pop of soy that has come to signify safety. Instead of evoking alarm or disgust, though, this bite brings a wisp of warmth. I turn to the container and fit another peppercorn between the prongs of my fork.

The pepperiness is stronger this time, and so is the recollection that accompanies it. The tall windows on the left side of the dining room look over a sizeable backyard where there once stood a pool that I don't remember and an unsturdy swingset I remember just a little more. The opening to the right of the dining room frames a spacious living room, where a pale gray couch is an observation deck for the coffee table in front of it, the well-played upright against one wall, and a TV diagonally crammed against the other.

I sit for a moment in the snow globe I have suddenly found myself enclosed in. I am entranced by the sounds, the spaces, the fleeting slivers of memory that flutter around me. I reach for another peppercorn.

I am floating among the songs of flute and voice that ring constantly between the shingled walls. I am wet with tears that drip from my face to the hands desperately dancing over the black and white keys below. I am shaken with laughter as three slick ace cards drop on top of the pile before me. I am breathing the smoke-filled air of a neighbor's house after getting off the school bus and realizing I didn't have keys.

I am touched by the long, golden afternoon rays of sun that skip gracefully across the snow. The crystals of my breath begin to reflect the freezing of my fingers and toes, and I am pulled back to my family to warm up. When I emerge again it is summer. Surrounded by a gated lawn that is boundless in the darkness of night, I crane my head upwards at the infinite tapestry of pinprick stars that mesmerize me from above.

The contents of my lunchbox had steadily disappeared as I traveled. Now there remained a single peppercorn, pitted and monumentally black against the last remaining piece of tofu. I slid my fork under it and lifted it into my mouth.

As soon as my teeth crack the peppercorn, the stars fade away. Sunlight streaks over the ground before vanishing too below the horizon. Wavering, rubato'd notes recede into the vibrations of bamboo and vocal chords, and playing cards fly back into my hand and into oblivion. Furniture shrink into specks of dust and walls fold in on themselves. I shield my eyes as the the delicate landscape around me falls away with dazzling spectacle, as if the universe had reached the limits of its expansion and come crashing back in. Time evaporates into mere wisps of smoke.

Just as I think that the asymptotic point of emptiness is about be hit and the snow globe about to shatter, all becomes still.

I slide my hand away from my face to find myself seated at a white-clothed dining table. A humble golden chandelier casts a warm glow over the plates of food below. At the sides of the table are seated my mother, my sister, my father. They pile savory meat and vegetable stews over bowls of rice. I pick up my chopsticks and do the same.

But the respite is only momentary. A peppercorn hides in the piece of rice between my chopsticks. I crunch down through the fluffiness to the gritty black ball. One last time, I feel its angry flavor erupt.

I look up to see my dad calmly raising a piece of celery to his lips, only he is growing translucent as he does so. I watch in curiosity at first, but then I see that my mother has joined him, fading away as she chews her own mouthful of food. With terror I realize that I am immobilized, unable to reach out or make a sound, only feel the crunch of peppercorn between my teeth and the growing, unidentifiable feeling within my own chest.

My dad has faded away completely now, along with the food in front of him, leaving his spot at the table occupied only by an empty plate. My mother, still unaware of her fading, now picks up a spoon and grabs a shovel-full of vegetables from a dish in the middle of the table. She turns to my sister and slides the vegetables on her plate. My sister pouts and pushes the spoon back. I am horrified to see that she, too, is now fading away, the rice under the newly-added vegetables on her plate slowly shrinking under the weight of time.

My mother, now just a fraction of the opacity of my sister or the room around her, finally turns towards me and reaches over in slow-motion. I feel her touch my shoulder, but now I can only barely see my mother. Just as fast as her touch came it disappears, and only my sister and I remain. She looks at me intently, but I don't know what to do. She too grows dimmer and dimmer, before finally looking away. She disappears, and I am alone.

I catch a glimpse of myself on the empty plates on the table, and realize that I, too, am fading. I leave behind my body and shoot upwards as the peppercorn is fully squashed between my teeth.

One way or another, all four of us are gone now. Along with the sunlight and the stars, we are but pretty pieces of a snow globe contained within peppercorn, that comfortingly angry, monolithic, and ultimately ephemeral vessel of time.

I swallow the last bite of my lunch and get back to work.

peppercorn

"I follow tech like people follow sports," I told an admissions interviewer once in ninth grade. "I know what the best products are, what differentiates them, what each of the companies are up to."

I was a tech nerd as a kid. You know the type — if you've been a young boy recently it's likely you've even embodied this nerdery yourself. My favorite YouTube channel at one point was Dave2D, whom I admired for his comprehensive, stats-based, level-headed laptop reviews, like one might admire a particular sports analyst and honor their predictions. Of course I also watched the obligatory channels: LinusTechTips, MKBHD, Austin Evans, TechnoBuffalo, TLDToday, and a long list of others.

At any given moment, I could tell you what the *best* laptop on the market was. I could tell you what the best graphics cards, CPUs, even motherboards and computer *cases* were. Not the best laptop or product for you, or the one that you should buy, just this abstract, competitive sense of *good*. Again, like one might argue for a sports player or team out of passion rather than meaningful analysis.

Like any tech nerd, I was always thinking about my dream setup. I put together Amazon wish lists with the monitors, keyboards, mice, and speakers I would buy, and pieced together components for custom builds on PCPartPicker. Watching videos from a family ASUS laptop that was physically falling apart by the day (the hinge assembly had cracked) or an iPhone 4S with not a square inch not shattered, I dreamed of having the latest and greatest ultrabook or phone.

Well, eventually these dreams started to come true. Our family had to buy a new laptop at some point, and with my extensive knowledge I made the pick, ending up with a Dell XPS 13 as dazzling as if it came straight off of the CES showfloor. For my first non-hand-me-down phone, I convinced my mom to let me back the Nextbit Robin on Kickstarter. I loved Android, but the phone itself was terrible, with a crummy camera, overheating issues, and unpredictable battery life with random shutdowns. A hit and a miss.

At first, these gains only fueled my tech obsession. I convinced my mom to get a Nexus 6P, and my sister a Nexus 5X. After my Nextbit became unusable within the year, my mom got me an OG Pixel XL, which I traded up for a 2XL the next year (I still use the 2XL; my mom today also has a 2XL and my sister has a 2. My work turned us into a Pixel family haha). I published laptop reviews on my YouTube channel to viewer counts consistently in the tens of thousands. For Christmas one year, I was shocked and elated when my mom ok'd about $1500 of PC parts and peripherals to make my own desktop setup. Another year, I got my hands on an A6500 with a beautiful 35mm f/1.8 prime.

Four years ago I got into my dream school of Andover, a boarding school half an hour north of Boston. (In fact, that's what the interview mentioned at the beginning of this blog post was for). I remember, some time after moving my setup and other belongings over to my new dorm room, sitting in front of my monitor — maybe editing videos, maybe doing schoolwork, or just playing Rocket League — and having a pretty jarring thought: everything that I wished for two, three, four years ago had come true.

I was living on my own, at my dream school, taking dream classes. My childhood best friend was there (though he didn't want to be my best friend anymore). And in front of me was a 4K monitor, a mechanical keyboard, an MX Master, a custom built gaming-ish PC with more power than I could use, and a camera that shot at a higher quality than cinema cameras a decade ago (in only some respects, but you get the point).

I didn't know what to do with this thought. There was the revelation that, wow, wait, my parents are actually rich and super willing to spend money on me. For some reason, the hundred-dollar price differences I obsessed over like sports stats...didn't matter in the scope that my mom operated at, at least not in the same way as to me.

For the next few years, my sports-y outlook on tech didn't really change, but grew stagnant as I didn't know what to do with it. I had reached the pinnacle of my imagined ladder, but there was no prize or championship title.

It's only in the last few months that my outlook on tech products has changed, and I understood why my mom didn't care about the things I did, having her seemingly less-informed approach towards making purchasing decisions.

In retrospect, of course, it's obvious how silly the little-kid kind of tech obsession is. Tech products aren't players in some sport, they're meant to be marketed to and used by real people as just a small part of their real lives. And in the scheme of your life, it doesn't matter if a laptop that's $2000 is only 10% better than a laptop that's $1000, or that an i7 is totally overkill for PowerPoint and you could just close your tabs and everything will be okay. If you're a businessperson making million dollar deals through Word documents, emails, and phone calls, a 10% improvement in the tools you use daily, or not having to worry about too many tabs slowing down a simple but crucial task, is easily worth that $1000 and more.

I've realized this as a software engineer. I work in a shared office space in downtown New York. The guy in the office next to me has a computer that looks like this, beautifully displayed in the glass window to the hallway:

![](/blog/2020-12/rgb.jpg)

My computer, on the other hand, looks like this:

![](/blog/2020-12/sff.jpg)

To a tech nerd, my build might actually be cooler than his. His is a standard, boxy ATX build. Mine is a tiny, painstakingly-built mini-ITX PC that turned my old mATX PC into something I can fit in my backpack (or just a smaller suitcase, as it is). A video I made on this build has 20K views, steadily bringing in more views even two years later.

The thing is, I don't care anymore.

The video I made for the mini-ITX build was almost even accidental — I had recorded a timelapse of the build and wanted to provide some context, for my own documentations' sake. I didn't expect anyone else to care, let alone for it to accumulate thousands of views.

Friends who don't know much about PC building — and even some who do — have mistaken this PC for some sort of heater or other household appliance.

See those two jumper wires in the back? Touching them together is the equivalent of pressing the power button, because the real power button broke and I had to find some way to be able to turn my PC on and off.

Compared to the Threadripper and RTX 2060 in my officemate's build, my PC is a snail. Hell, there are laptops today that are cheaper and more powerful than my desktop, *and* as light as my laptop with better battery life. Three or four years ago, I would have been entranced by those kind of stats. Today, though, that Threadripper build is...just another build. Good for the guy next door to have it. I bet he doesn't care much for its intricacies, either, just using a conveniently powerful PC to run his construction surveying business.

My shoebox build is beautiful, humble, and still blazing fast for everything I need it for and more. It's not that I don't appreciate its performance and all the care I put into maximizing it, but I appreciate it in new ways. I appreciate that Jekyll builds my blog twice or three times as fast as my laptop. I appreciate that it can run monster Docker containers and power an entire local enterprise SaaS backend for me to develop on. I appreciate that I can load up Zoom or Gmail reliably at any moment rather than waiting the 15 seconds up to several minutes that it takes on my laptop.

My setup is gorgeous — again, everything I dreamed of a few years ago. But it's only that. I've been using that mechanical keyboard, without any backlighting or fanciness, since I got it four years ago. The monitor, too, has been around since the beginning, and the mic is the same model as the mic my dad bought for me when I was in elementary school. My MX Master — the nicest, techiest mouse in existence — I sold to a friend at school, and now I use a $10 gaming mouse my mom bought off of Amazon.

![](/blog/2020-12/setup.jpg)

Don't get me wrong, I know that this is a ludicrously nice setup. It came from my upper-middle-class family that was able to drop a couple thousand dollars on things that make my life easier. I'm only now starting to make my own money and purchases.

But there's a sort of stability here. My silly childhood tech obsessiveness is solidly anchored now by maturity, an early arc of my life come to an end, in anticipation of new ones to come. I realize now that it was a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality that overcame me when I walked by that RGB Threadripper build for the umpteenth time, compelling me to jot down this blog post.

There's no unique or profound point to make here, only a story of mine that's run its course and now exists only in memory, whether fading away in my brain or shared out in this blog post. I sometimes hear about the pursuits of younger siblings of friends — some who are impressed by my videos and setup, some who are far deeper in than I ever was — and I'm reminded of my own past.

To me, this naiive, childish, sometimes expensive obsession is beautiful — a rippling embodiment of childhood, growing up, and the passage of time.

my childhood tech obsession is beautiful

A roar starts up, fills the air. I look up and see lines, streaks in the air, barely visible on their own but with great motion and energy when saturating the sky. Voluminous, worldly. These panes of glass feel so sturdy usually, a barrier between the ultimate comfort and stronghold, my home, its heating in the winter, its cool in the summer, its brightness when working at night and darkness when sleeping. Windows are a view outside, a painting, a pleasantry, a decoration.

But, having been on the inside of it for a week now, these panes of glass have thinned. The rain outside: not a decoration, but a representation of all the things that exist, thunderous and massive and beyond comprehension. Grand, tumultuous, and thoroughly unconcerned with me, with any of brick structures that tightly pack and wind themselves into this city. The windows are no more than wires of a cage.

I look around; the room has darkened significantly as this feeling takes hold of me. Then, as quickly as it started, the roar dissipates. The downpour has moved on, leaving only its mist in its wake, barely perceptible streaks of rainshower, droplets clinging to the windowscreen. The downpour, huge and touching, yet so transient; something to always calculate for, to fear, to dread when it persists, but never guaranteed, always fleeting.

A small, low, wispy cloud moves quickly across the sky, a canvas of uniform glowing gray-white. My desk area brightens, lit by nature’s great diffused softbox. The sounds of the city resume, the hum of traffic, the sirens, my mother working at the dining table behind me. The windows re-solidify.

![](/blog/2020-04/rain.jpg)

roar

I sat on the floor of my room, eyes closed. My brain was filled with noise, with random thoughts and anxieties throwing themselves all around. “Clear, clear,” I thought, trying to shout them down, tune them out. I listened to my own breathing, listened to the noises around me, but all my thoughts were still there, resisting, entangling.

Without realizing, at some point my “clear, clear” thoughts go away. Everything goes away. It is blank for a second, as if I’m too tired to think or about to fall asleep. Time is suspended. There is absolutely nothing at all.

A car makes a swooshing sound as it drives across the road in the back. The swoosh is like a gentle, light stroke on a blank canvas as it enters my mind, fading away back to nothingness as it passes. I hear another rumbling, that does not pass by and fade. Perhaps from inside the building, I think. I’m aware of my hands touching the carpeted floor, and it is as if my senses are extending from my palm and fingertips into the ground, through the walls, to the levels below, throughout the building. I feel the existence of the world around me, of another car as it passes by the road behind me, of the air of a strange 60 degree day in the middle of January, of the leafless trees and drab-colored grass. My own existence disappears. There is only the world, and I exist as part of it: this world is me, I have become the world, I am the world.

“This is peace,” I think. “It was so hard to achieve it, surely it will be easy to break and fall away from.” The uncontrollable (only containable) destructive instinct of the human mind kicks in. Against my will, it summons back my anxiety, my scheduling concerns, the work I have to do. I feel it, and fear that I have lost the peace that was so profound and beautiful.

But I am proven wrong. The peace is with me now. My thoughts exist alongside it, and I am aware they have the power to erode and overcome the peace, and inevitably will with time unless I make an effort to prevent it. But the peace has a power of its own. Once achieved, it is temporarily self-sustaining and resilient, so much as no direct attack is launched at it or something more immediately powerful comes along and replaces it. The peace makes it easier to control my thoughts. Standing on the tangled mess itself, of course it is hard to untangle: peace provides a second platform on which I can stand.[^abram]

I can feel the peace somewhat fading now. Language, perhaps, is one of the things that erodes peace: not strongly, for language is a tool of its user.[^abramlanguage] It inherently contains some elements that are external to the individual; moments of greatest disturbance of peace are when I hesitate to determine what word or phrasing to use. However, when language flows as if it is in my nature, it does not conflict with the peace. Here, it is a tool for more clearly experiencing it.

I think about things that feel “off” to me in a way I can’t describe. Suburban houses and communities, so deliberately designed and socially entangled. House-hunting reality TV shows. They feel wrong to me because they represent the pursuit for a home at such a removed and non-individual level: there is no peace to be found. There is no peace to be found in television drama, either. They represent opposites: individual and social, internal and external, temporal and eternal.[^kierkegaard]

Proximity to peace is attained by the removal of barriers between the individual and the world around them. Social constructs are such barriers and bring the individual farther from peace.

The reason I decided to meditate in the first place was because I was frustrated while doing my physics homework. It was not the physics homework that was the problem. Doing physics problems can be a purely individual pursuit, connecting you with an idea and minimizing all other obstructions, thereby bringing you closer to peace, but only if you do them for the purpose of individual connection. My frustration came from the passage of time and the presence of pressure to complete the homework within a time frame so I can move on to other work and get it done, as prescribed not by me but by external factors: the classes I am taking, the responsibilities to others I have taken on.

*Originally written on January 12, 2020. Edited and posted on February 23, 2020.*

[^abram]: A few weeks later, I would find that what I called “peace” was similar to the “life-world” described by phenomenologists Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, which I read about in Abram’s *The Spell of the Senuous*. The basis of reality is the senuous world, in which consciousness is one contributor, not the encompassing platform, Abram writes. He reframes the perception of an object as a two-way act of “participation;” each object is animate and possesses agency, with its own “styles and sensibilities...tones and textures,” and perception is the “attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves.” A strikingly applicable quote: “Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent or wordless dance already going on — this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits.”

[^abramlanguage]: Abram speaks to this, too: “To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being.”

[^kierkegaard]: Borrowing language from Kierkegaard’s *The Sickness Unto Death*

peace

Searching for a study space with sight of the clear afternoon sun, Maxwell and I end up in the back stairwell of the library. Tucked between the furthest back study rooms, the stairwell is rarely trafficked, its solid marble steps rising through the square cutout that rises up and down through the building. On the top floor, a window to the left, slightly offset, lets in beams of sunlight that travel to the wall we are sitting against, forming a glowing pattern. When clouds pass over the sun, the light turns to a pale glow, drowned out by the warm-pink artificial light overhead. We sit on the hard marble floor, our backpacks to our sides, me with my laptop on my legs crossed and out straight, Maxwell with a small book of Shakespeare between his tucked legs, quietly and steadily filling it with underlines and annotations.

Sounds echo around the stairwell boomingly but as if from far away, as if it were a massive, cavernous space. Each press of my keyboard returns like the echo of a gunshot. Drum hits in the music we play expand beyond the speakers of my laptop and reverberate through the room as if produced that way to begin with. When we speak, our words travel out, bounce back, overlap and multiply. The air fills up and becomes oversaturated with volume, so we must choose our words carefully and not say too many, fearful that something will overfill and spill.

The echoing and the marble evoke the feeling of being in a massive, stark, empty marble temple or palace; a great dim, colorless hall with columns going down each side.

The glowing rectangle of light, softly wavering and textured by the trees and leaves, have shadows cast on it: straight, regular ones from muttons on the windows, and irregular, moving ones from me and Maxwell. The harsh afternoon light hits my face and nostalgia fills me up. Memories trickle in, wash over me and run by: winter afternoons after school, walking into my snowy backyard after getting off the school bus instead of going inside, drinking up the golden air, the pristine landscape, the crisp, pure cold around me. Finally being alone after a long day at school and with friends in the city, or at least anonymous, I walk home through Morningside Park, on broad Cathedral Parkway with its somehow calm but consistent flow of traffic and people, lined with spread-out businesses, old five-story brownstones, ten-story brick apartment buildings, modern glass and concrete high-rises. When I finally get home, I greet the constantly flowing (but to me familiar, lazy, and comforting) traffic circle weaving a little loop at the corner between my apartment building, the Upper West Side, Harlem, and Central Park.

*Originally written on November 3rd, 2019. Edited and posted on February 13, 2020.*

library stairwell

Sitting in a coach bus — "the nicest I've ever seen," says Christina — my relphil reading on my lap in front of me, wearing sleek purple-blue Nordic gear up top down to ugly sweatpants and boots below, listening to quiet music through my headphones, the world races by the window. We're on a highway, so most of the time it's just woods with the occasional small house peaking through. But we cross a bridge over the Merrimack River and suddenly the view changes, opens up a bit: a sliver of the world, just big enough to hint at its largeness, its infintesimal complexity. It's a sight I've seen a few times on Cross Country bus rides and Cycling rallywagon ones. It's a feeling I felt regularly growing up, each weekend traveling dozens of miles on a highway going to skiing or piano lessons, or Chinese School, or a gathering with family friends. We pass through little hill towns. Libraries, churches, office buildings peak up above the trees, the slightly elevated highway we are on giving a sense at once of the town's enclosing smallness and thorough completeness. Each week I saw this entire world go by my window, yet I knew and still know nothing about it, and probably never will.

At the same time, there's a whole world inside the window. On the bus, my friends, my work, my team, my sport. In the car, my mom, my dad, my sister, a rare friend, one or two at a time or all at once. Each a unique atmosphere, deep relationships that make up my self, distinct emotions and experiences.

*Originally written on January 29, 2020. Edited and posted on February 13, 2020.*

bus ride

There’s a simple joy to folding clothes. At 2 AM, I descended to my room only to find the pile of unfolded laundry I had left on my bed. I was dismayed at not being able to sleep sooner, but soon enthusiastically dove into the task of folding the seemingly countless pieces of fabric. One at a time I take a piece of clothing, roll it, put it down.

At first, it doesn’t seem to make an impact. The pile still takes up most of the bed, and I stack things on my pillow. But soon, the somewhat uniform rolls of shirts, socks, and underwear start forming neat patterns. I work in silence for a while, then put on music on my phone, quietly. My mind numbs and my hands reclaim the deftness achieved from the hundreds of times I’ve completed this task.

It’s a relaxing break from the rest of my day: sitting absolutely still, thoughts of what I need to do and complex ideas I need to synthesize flying around tortuously in my skull. Here there’s no new information, just what I have in front of me, and my hands do their thing, slowly reducing chaos to order, a steady, comforting progress.

*Originally written on January 15, 2020. Edited on February 13, 2020.*

folding clothes

An apology through email holds up as an admission of guilt in a court of law.

As soon as you apologize, it's over.

I spent the whole time fighting. I didn't apologize because I believed in what I was fighting for, believed I was in the right. Every statement was carefully considered.

"Sorry," I texted tonight.

Now judgement lay in the hands of history, the hands of time.

*Originally written on February 11, 2020. Edited on February 17, 2020.*

Tag: #moments