On Finding

On Finding

Dedicated to all the friends I've "found" on my timeline. My family is well recognized in my work, but there are far too many others to name. If you know me personally, and you're reading this, you were one of my jays — and I thank you for that.

I

When was the last time you realized you lost your keys, stopped to think about where you left them, and found them all inside the same ten-second window?

Never happened?

Me either.

If we as humans can't even logically find our car keys, how are we supposed to find purpose? My friend the reader, that's a question I won't have an answer for… for you.[1]

But I have several answers for me.

I fear this may be the most "egotistical" piece of the On ——ing series. But that's okay, because this journey is going to be an explanation of the jays I felt in my lifetime, and how they carved and shaped me into being a good person.

On Arriving and On Counting give very non-logical descriptions of why I was born. Why I was born was: my parents made it so. There's no truth more important than that one for you to hold as we continue.

I'm just a normal person, like you. Some of you reading might even have a degree. I don't have one as I write this, but as you can see from my words, my intent to finish school this time is almost divine in the design of how it all fell into place for me.

These works? A very detailed accumulation of the jays I've absorbed throughout my life. Lessons learned. Victories earned. Emotions felt. Existence measured through experience.[2]

The human condition. Existentialism. So ugly, and yet so beautiful. Why do we push away the things we don't understand? You'll search forever if you skip the answer. That's a part of the paradox.

Let me get back to the point. Me. What makes ME so special.

Nothing.

Plain and simple, that's the truth of it. I'm just a clump of cells, made up of O, H, N, and C. Walking through time like nothing matters. Well, almost nothing.

By my math, about half of the possibilities in front of us are good, and half bad. We can understand the bad ones exist. That part matters. Just lean a little more toward the good every day, and you'll align.

How quickly the mind can get off track. I'm sitting here trying to write a brief history of myself, and I can't even accept the fact that it doesn't matter to the reader. So I'll keep it short. I'll talk about the most important jays I found during my search for purpose.

II

Early in life, it was books. So many books. As a child, everything from Goosebumps to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, all the way to Where the Sidewalk Ends. Later in life I grew my love for fiction to J. R. R. Tolkien, Stephen King, and Michael Crichton. And here most recently, Dan Brown — what a genius that man is. The ability of a fiction author to create a story inside another person's mind with words… is absolutely magical. Every lover of books knows what I'm talking about.

Bibiana showed me books like Siddhartha, Contact, Dracula, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.[3] Later, moving on toward introspective fiction — almost pseudo-fiction, if you look at current affairs — Ayn Rand, Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut all wove their messages through my brain. Later still, when I could really absorb what I was reading, I began to explore the works of Carl Sagan, Carl Jung, Plato, and Aristotle, and took a nose dive into history.

I spent a lot of time learning about the American Civil War, and World War II. On a deeper level, it feels like some other version of me moved through these two wars. Not a memory I could lay my hands on, nothing I could point to in a book — more a feeling that hums underneath the morbid fascination, and would go a long way toward explaining it.

I also spent a lot of time learning about the Egyptians. Not sure if "past-life" me spent time there, but I can somehow understand how they built without recourse for the greater good. That says more than I'm willing to admit to myself.

The lens gets blurry after school. Let's just say I took a quick trip through the psychedelic universe, and also spent a considerable amount of time learning about the American legal system. We don't have to go into detail — just know, as I've said, that today my mind is unadulterated, and my lessons were learned. I'm also very glad to see the amount of research being put into psychedelics as antidepressants. It is early, careful, and genuinely promising work, and I follow it as an interested reader rather than as anyone qualified to judge it.[4]

III

Let's move on to music.

After that explosive experience in my life, I quickly fell into a point of creation that I didn't understand. Music around me resonated deeply. There was meaning in songs that made you feel good.

I was going to be a famous musician. I was sure of it. I was actually quite successful — until I took success for granted and reached for more. Flew too close to the sun, in another form of the words.[5] But in reality, I demanded money I knew I didn't deserve. I expected things to happen.

They didn't happen.

But what of the music? Jays exist in music. Even in classical music, that has no words. There exists an entire subject around it called music theory: the study of how music actually works — the grammar of pitch and harmony, melody, rhythm, and form, how tension gathers and resolves, how a piece holds itself together as a structure in time. But never before has it explored the idea that the creators may not have understood they were building things that would stand the test of time.

Beethoven was a proud, irascible, increasingly solitary man who began going deaf in his late twenties and was profoundly deaf by the end, composing some of his most transcendent work when he could no longer hear a note of it.[6] Chopin was frail and chronically ill, dead at thirty-nine, a Polish émigré in Paris who never saw his homeland again and poured that lost country into the keys.[7] But somehow they made pieces of voiceless music that have outlasted the buildings they composed in.

IV

So if you haven't found it already, go find it.

Purpose. ♥

If you've found it — call me. I'm still looking.

Notes

1. The paradox has a name and a long pedigree: Plato's Meno (80d–81e) asks how one can search for what one does not already, in some sense, know — and answers with anamnesis, recollection. The keys are a small version of the same trouble.

2. Register note: "existence measured through experience" is the phenomenological wager — that first-person experience is a legitimate starting point for inquiry rather than a contaminant to be subtracted. It has a serious literature (Husserl's method; Merleau-Ponty on the lived body; James on the stream of thought; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch on first-person method in cognitive science). This essay is not a contribution to that literature. It is one person's account, offered in that spirit.

3. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is itself the parable of this essay's problem: the seeker whose seeking is what blocks the finding, until he stops.

4. Accuracy note: the clinical research on psilocybin and related compounds for depression is real, ongoing, and genuinely promising in early trials, but it remains investigational rather than established, with open questions about durability, blinding, and adverse events. Nothing here is a recommendation.

5. Icarus, in Ovid's Metamorphoses VIII: the wax wings, the warning ignored, the fall.

6. Beethoven's hearing loss began around 1798 and was near-total by the last decade; the Ninth Symphony was completed in 1824, when he could no longer hear it performed.

7. Chopin left Poland in 1830, never returned, and died in Paris in 1849 at thirty-nine.

References

Hesse, H. (1951). Siddhartha (H. Rosner, Trans.). New Directions. (Original work published 1922)

Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, first book (F. Kersten, Trans.). Nijhoff. (Original work published 1913)

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Ovid. (2004). Metamorphoses (D. Raeburn, Trans.). Penguin.

Plato. (1997). Meno (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 870–897). Hackett.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.

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