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 sent me a Jay, 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. (A Jay, in my vocabulary, is one moment as a person lives it from the inside, with a feel and a weight of its own, leaning toward holding together with everything present or away from it.)

On Arriving and On Counting give very non-logical descriptions of why I was born: one reads the sky over the season I was made, when a satellite first saw dust circling Vega, and the other adds up the year I arrived and gets twenty-one, one of the golden numbers.² 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 Traces of the Jays I’ve absorbed and created throughout my life. Lessons learned. Victories earned. Emotions felt. Existence measured through experience.³

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.⁴

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.

My cousin Bibiana showed me books like Siddhartha, Contact, Dracula, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.⁵ 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 a thought for themselves: something none of them would live to benefit from, for a culture that would benefit long after they were gone. 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 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, done with adults, and I follow it as an interested reader rather than as anyone qualified to judge it.⁶

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.⁷ But in reality, I demanded money I knew I didn’t deserve. I expected things to happen.

They didn’t happen.

A moment that leans away like that stays with you as a lesson, and you only go around that same loop again if you choose to.

But what of the music? Jays get made in music. Even in classical music that has no words. There’s a whole subject built around it called music theory: how music actually works, from pitch and harmony to rhythm and form, how tension builds and lets go. What I wonder about is whether the people who made it understood they were building things that would stand the test of time.⁸

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 barely hear it.⁹ 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.¹⁰ But somehow they made pieces of voiceless music that have outlasted the men who made them.

That’s a Trace, the way I use the word: what a life leaves behind, still being picked up nearly two hundred years later by strangers who make Jays of their own out of it. Every life leaves them, whichever way it faces, good ones to the degree that it is aligned.

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

2. Johnson, On Arriving, sets a birth beside the year 1983, when the IRAS satellite found a ring of dust around Vega in the very months that life was being made. Johnson, On Counting, sums the digits of that year to twenty-one, a Fibonacci number, and sets the birth at the bottom of a fraction that leans in toward Φ.

3. “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 phenomenological reduction (Husserl, Ideas); Merleau-Ponty on the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception); James on the stream of thought (James, Principles of Psychology, chap. 9); and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch on first-person method in cognitive science (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, Embodied Mind). This essay is not a contribution to that literature. It is one person’s account, offered in that spirit.

4. By the good I mean what the Golden Rule names, in both of its old forms: treat people the way you’d want to be treated (Luke 6:31), and what is hateful to you, don’t do to someone else (Hillel, in the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Either way it is judged from where the other person is standing, not from where I am.

5. 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. In the last chapter, Siddhartha tells his old friend Govinda that a seeker is held fast by the goal he seeks, while finding asks for freedom and openness and no goal at all. Hesse, Siddhartha.

6. The clinical research on psilocybin and related compounds for depression in adults is real, ongoing, and promising in early trials. As of this writing (October 2026) it remains investigational in the United States, where no psilocybin treatment has been approved; Australia has allowed authorized psychiatrists to prescribe it for treatment-resistant depression since July 2023. Open questions remain about how long the benefit lasts, about blinding, and about adverse events. In the largest phase 2 trial, of 233 adults with treatment-resistant depression, a single 25 mg dose did better than 1 mg at three weeks, a 10 mg dose did not, and most participants reported adverse events. Goodwin et al., “Single-Dose Psilocybin.” A trial against the antidepressant escitalopram found no significant difference on its primary measure. Carhart-Harris et al., “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram.” Nothing here is a recommendation.

7. Icarus, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the wax wings, the warning ignored, the fall. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 8.

8. The question has been asked, though not by music theory in the narrow sense. Lydia Goehr argues that the idea of the musical work, a piece that lasts on its own apart from any one performance, did not govern musical practice until around 1800, so that most composers before then wrote for the occasion at hand; Beethoven stands at the turn. Goehr, Imaginary Museum. Beethoven, at least, had some sense of it: in the Heiligenstadt Testament of October 1802 he wrote that he could not leave the world until he had brought out everything he felt was in him.

9. Beethoven’s hearing began to fail around 1798, when he was twenty-seven, and was badly gone by about 1818, when he began using conversation books; he never became totally deaf. He finished the Ninth Symphony in February 1824, and at its premiere that May he had to be turned around to see the applause he could not hear.

10. Chopin left Warsaw in November 1830, never returned to Poland, and died in Paris in October 1849, at thirty-nine.

Bibliography

Carhart-Harris, Robin, Bruna Giribaldi, Rosalind Watts, et al. “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression.” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994.

Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Clarendon Press, 1992.

Goodwin, Guy M., Scott T. Aaronson, Oscar Alvarez, et al. “Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression.” New England Journal of Medicine 387, no. 18 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2206443.

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Translated by Hilda Rosner. New Directions, 1951. First published 1922.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by F. Kersten. Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Collected Works 2. Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. First published 1913. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7445-6.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. Henry Holt, 1890.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Arriving. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20694684.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Counting. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20711131.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Routledge, 2012. First published 1945.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Indiana University Press, 1955.

Plato. Meno. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991.

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