Reflections 2021
Apologies for my late arrival to the reflection party (hellooo? Any stragglers or time travelers still here?).
All things considered, 2021 was one of the most eventful and growth-inducing years I’ve had thus far. A big reason for this was that I got into a committed romantic relationship, one that forced me to reexamine old patterns that were no longer serving me.
Prior to living in Vermont (4 years ago now), I was incredibly averse to any form of long-term commitment. This was partly due to circumstance – i.e. my many temporary jobs – but it manifested as a fear of settling even when I knew what I liked. I was too preoccupied with questions of who I was and what the best version of my life could be to give what I already had my fullest attention. Only later did I learn that not choosing is itself a pernicious form of commitment, one defined by a lack of substance and definition.
My mind found a billion reasons to quit in the earlier parts of our relationship: your life isn’t stable enough; you don’t know what you want; you’re too different; she’s too needy for you; she doesn’t get you and your weird quirks and passions; PHILIP IF YOU CLOSE THAT DAMN DOOR IT WILL BE THE END OF YOU. It tormented me and led to conflicts between us, holding these thoughts in mind and holding her.
What saved us was that we were committed to staying with the tension. We chose to engage with our problems and insecurities rather than run from them. She often reminded me that the door was always open if I wanted to leave, but it was during one of our later conversations that I felt her words were coming from a place of unconditional acceptance. I felt that she was more concerned about my happiness than the relationship itself, which made me love her even more. She had grown to love me enough to let me go, and I had grown to love her enough to fully commit.
It’s true then: this relationship and my other commitments ended me. There is now more room for the things I thought I wouldn’t or couldn’t be doing: writing, playing guitar, building a relationship, living in one place for longer than a year, learning math and statistics in graduate school, cultivating a joyous mind worth befriending and inhabiting. These are currently the essential ingredients of my days.
What hasn’t changed is the aim of viewing myself and life more as a mosaic process and less as a finish line to be crossed. Doing so means forgetting ourselves by deeply connecting with the world. It involves others and hobbies and challenges and meaning and love. It requires devotion and learning how to give closer attention to the minutia of the every day. As you tie together all the small wonderful details into the story of your life, you may discover that there is so much more than enough for a lifetime, so much more that matters than you or I.
Some Memorable Memories
Interviewing my parents about Vietnam and their refugee experience.
Relearning how to draw for a week.
Meeting my girlfriend in a coffee shop on Church St (Black Cap).
Teaching my girlfriend how to slackline on an early summer afternoon.
Watching my girlfriend bench press the bar at the gym for the first time.
Swing dancing with my girlfriend.
Virtual dancing with my Neuromatch pod.
Kayaking in search of bioluminescence somewhere in Maine.
Disconnecting and reconnecting in a treehouse somewhere in New Hampshire.
Driving my neighbor to Dartmouth hospital and eating Nepalese food after.
Feeding organic lettuce to the same neighbor’s chickens.
Seeing my childhood friend get engaged in California.
Hosting my sister for her first trip to Burlington.
Winning 2 lbs of chocolate almonds from Principles of Complex Systems.
Hanging onto dear life when R pulled out her phone and asked Z to take her eyes off the road “only for 30 seconds” to watch a TikTok video.
Walking by the lake, catching a crystal-clear sunset, eating Dim Sum for dinner with my girlfriend one winter evening, with her at her best: alive, curious, questioning, free.
Sharing my poem Hands with Dad, and his response that meant everything to me: “Wow, I am very grateful and glad to have put some impression (ingredients) in your life. You guys are my best reward in life. Thank you son.”
Favorites
Books
Already Free by Bruce Tift
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
Essays and Articles
Seeing frees. So often when we misunderstand people it’s because we’re not willing to look—we’re too busy projecting our own needs and narratives onto them. We make excuses. We ignore the feelings bubbling up within us, the smoke in the sky a sign that something’s not quite right. We give our power away so we avoid the burden of autonomy. Anthony de Mello: See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality. If we’re really willing to see people, really willing to know them, then we become truly able to care for them. Because we recognize the ways they’ll let us down and the things about them that will always excite us. We trust that they love us, even if they don’t always know how. We free them from responsibility for our happiness, and in return we gain the ability to take joy in who they are.
So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.
It is possible that this view may make it easier to cope with the prospect of personal extinction, since, if we accept it, we can no longer anticipate being hurled into oblivion, to face the eternal blackness that so unsettled Burgess (and, I suspect, secretly bedevils many atheists and agnostics). We may wear our personalities more lightly, seeing ourselves as simply variations on a theme of subjectivity which is in no danger of being extinguished by our passing. Of course we cannot completely put aside our biologically given aversion to the prospect of death, but we can ask, at its approach, why we are so attached to this context of consciousness. Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body? If we are no longer haunted by nothingness, then dying may seem more like the radical refreshment of subjectivity than its extinction.
The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I’ve observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think “stupid thoughts” end up understanding things much more deeply over time. Conversely, when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.
Perhaps our sense of this, the sense of belonging to a world held together by networks of ephemeral confidences (such as philosophies and stock markets) rather than permanent certainties, predisposes us to embrace the pleasures of our most primitive and unlangued sense. Being mystified doesn’t frighten us as much as it used to. And the point for me is not to expect perfumery to take its place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything else to become like perfume.
Hands
- for Dad.
- Look at what all these years
- have done to your hands.
- The hands of a man
- born on two shorelines,
- the hands of an artist
- and engineer who makes knives
- pirouette on stained bamboo boards.
- You still season the chicken
- with ginger and sarcasm,
- and your pho reminds us
- that all love needs
- is bones and water.
- I’ve tried writing the steps
- down, but what recipe
- could ever contain you?
- Who could hope to recreate
- what you have touched?
- God has made his attempts,
- but the angel you once held
- wants nothing more
- than your hands again.