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Last week at the temple during meditation I had a new experience. Instead of noticing the entirety of my body’s surface area at any given instance (which I’m proud to say has become a normal daily occurrence for me), I transitioned briefly into a new state where (for lack of better words) I felt as if I weren’t separate from space, like I was uniform with everything else all the way through my body rather than just on the surface. Visually, I remember the experience as if all

(7/3) Tomorrow is the final day of a week long trip that I spent in France with my girlfriend. We met in Geneva, once she finished up what can only be described as “Swiss Army Search and Rescue Robotics Boot Camp” - a weeklong robotics workshop and competition where she slept in Swiss Army barracks, shared communal showers, worked a billion hours, and slept not enough. We swam in Lake Geneva before taking a train directly to Paris, arriving in the evening. The next day was ch

Last week I managed a day on 4 hours of sleep due to launching 3 satellites for work at 2:40am. Between then and now I recorded two demo podcast episodes in Pittsburgh and found out that Exist With Initiative had been granted 501c3 status, tax exemption from the IRS. Though excited about both, my brain immediately went into, “what can I do now that we’re here”. The podcast went really well, much better than I expected. I sent the 12 hour meeting invite/agenda broken down int

I’m writing this and feeling negatively. I notice most times that I consider writing while not feeling great I retreat rather quickly, but I think that’s a disservice to myself. How many of the best stories, songs, paintings, and poems were created from negative emotion? Thinking about it right now, I wonder if it’s the majority. At some point in the future I’d like to finish The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell, but it’s incredibly dry and stuffed with vocabulary too far ov

As I opened the door a few mountain jays flew in, at least three before I closed it. I never discovered the actual name for these birds, but they were my favorites. The first I’d seen them was a summer I worked on a farm in the Swiss alps, and the locals called them mountain jays. Their blue bodies darkened into jet black spanning from their necks to the tip of the spiked tuffs atop their heads. They looked a bit different in Colorado, but the colors were the same. “How weird

I had a pleasant meditation yesterday evening, and I found myself contemplating purpose as I left the temple. While in a meditative state, thoughts come in all different shapes and sizes. Sometimes they’re verbal fragments, entire visual scenes, or something indescribable. I can tell how noisy my mind is within the first minute of a meditation, and in the hour that I sat cross legged yesterday, I noticed the noise was different than how it used to be. The noise used to be mor

To my alien friends, There are many humans with belief systems based on logic, observation, and measurement. There are even more humans that believe in things outside of the quantifiable, things that fit their first-person experience in some way that conflicts with the scientific method. I go back and forth on luck. My mother had always said my brother was lucky, which is why we could always find good parking spots at the grocery store. My sister was lucky too, which is why s

From a wooly mahogany flannel follow through, Pinus Cembra in fruitful abundance flowed like glacial excretion; Wood, scattered as starlings mid-murmuration, permeated into echelons of utility. The lumber settled like Scotch-aged moments amongst the fleeing Adonis Blues. Earth dusted callouses embrace carved hickory. In an affinity locus symbolizing the need for one another; Iron sifts through years of sturdiness with pleasantly redundant steady swings. Transcendental asy

Today I’m thinking through every way I enjoy spending my time, naturally leading me toward considering how little time there really is. I’m incredibly fortunate to work in a meaningful, interesting, and lucrative field, where I spend nearly half of all awake moments. As far as normal life goes, I’m really lucky in this regard (and in many others). I love spending time with my girlfriend, my friends, and my family. I love spending time running, working out, meditating, reading

Beneath branches of willow sleeps On pillow moss a forbidden heart Beating shallow for love it laughs Compounding beauty alive with art Soft hip a hammock my mind does lay As dreams do dim and her words a harp Subtle hymns and vigilant eyes Meet pursed lips to which I come apart Cautious waltz to caressing thumb Persevering love we traveled far To meet here beneath this willow Minutes shared and now a distant heart

A few years ago I attended a wedding for a friend of mine at a vineyard on the coast of France. It was a beautiful ceremony, and I had an amazing time. Following the wedding was two days in Paris with a few friends that preceded about four days in London with some other friends. All wonderful. Post London I took a train to Wales where I caught a ferry to Dublin. I felt home as soon as I was alone, feeling lighter on the train. The ferry ride was full of wonder that accompanie

Last year a younger professional asked me if we could spend some time together talking about career advancement. We’ve had many sessions since then, and it’s fair to say the insights and perspectives go both ways. He feels that I could be more forward in my convictions, once saying to me, “don’t be afraid to cause a problem”. He wasn’t wrong to some degree. I’m not a karma guy, but I do believe people are less likely to throw me curve balls when I’m not causing problems. In a

It has become natural for me to open my phone while I wait for things, justifying the habit through the many tasks I can complete - texts, emails, finances, task tracking, calendar management, etc. I even started drafting this from the back of an Uber. Last weekend I went into a shop to order coffee, and I opened my phone the second I left the cash register. I stared at the screen for a moment before realizing that I hadn’t intended to accomplish any tasks, just distract my

My friend with the deepest understanding of classical philosophy texted me recently stating that he himself probably isn’t self aware, statistically. According to my favorite search engine, 95% of people believe that they are self aware while only 10-15% actually are. That 10-15% of people are supposed to hold an accurate representation of themselves inwardly and outwardly, knowing accurately how they actually are, how they impact others, and how others actually see them. In

I open my eyes and I’m standing just beneath the summit of a large basalt mountain facing a white painted wooden crate on four wheels with castors. I use a drill to take out the four screws securing the lid to the box. I remove the lid, leaning it against the empty crate. My personal laptop is stacked on top of my work laptop, and I set them both in the crate. There’s no work I need to be doing right now. I set my phone, keys, and wallet in the crate. I don’t need to talk to

If you want to send something to space, it’s typically three different teams that are responsible for: Verifying the engineering of the thing meets “sendable to space” requirements Getting the thing into a rocket Flying the thing once it’s in space I was fortunate in my last aerospace role to have responsibilities in all three facets, and it was another reminder that everything is just people. I worked with NASA mission managers to figure out what sorts of things we would sen

I assume many of us have heard some variation of, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” The phrasing implies that we are responsible for whatever comes out of our mouths. I also assume many of us weren’t taught to take full responsibility for our thoughts, and I wonder why this isn’t a common point of teaching. Maybe it feels invasive, abstract, or difficult. Maybe we wouldn't feel safe to be vulnerable within our own minds. We do register every

I hadn't ever felt called to explicitly identify my core values until a friend asked me what mine were. Through an exercise within a Brene Brown book, she identified two core values for herself. Discussion helped me realize that one benefit of knowing ourselves in a few words included better decision making. When between two decisions, we can lean on our core values to show us which decision best aligns with ourselves. How should we spend our limited time when we don't know w

The first time I left the country was to visit Kenya when I was 19. A friend from Sri Lanka invited me and another friend to visit his father, a man who lived in Kenya doing tea trade. The friend who invited us lost his passport in a mosh pit after we bought our tickets, so we went and winged it for three weeks without him - only seeing his dad briefly for lunch one afternoon. I have many thoughts about this trip, but what’s on my mind today is related to an experience walkin

The first time that I visited the Buddhist Vihara I didn’t know what to expect. I took off my shoes on the front porch and left them with the others in some cubbies. The door was locked, so I knocked and rang the bell. Eventually a monk in a robe opened the door for me, asked if I was there for meditation, then led me into the main room of the temple. He gestured to a pile of mats and then the floor. The mat I picked couldn’t have felt less designed for comfort. It felt like