Em and I have been married for two years. We're back in my hometown where I've joined the family business as part of succession planning. We traded a $225k income for $75k and a 15% equity position. We bought our fourth house, which we currently spend the weekends renovating - we just finished flooring and paint. The other three are rented. I do consulting work on the side, trying to keep my technical skills somewhat sharp while attempting to bridge the gap in lifestyle change due to income.
The dogs are in good health, thankfully. They're patient with us during the series of transitions. A remarkable source of grounding. Ruth is almost 9, and it's hard not to begin thinking about the time we have left.
We're establishing a new routine, getting back into our 6-mile walks and meal prepping lunches. I'm working 60-80 hours a week, but seeing the impact gives me a sense of purpose - more than I've felt in prior roles where I effectively traded meaning for money. In a real way, I'm thankful to myself in my 20s for pushing so hard - it's made this next stage somewhat easier, both financially and professionally.
In managing a company, I've found an outlet where my theories can take physical form - similar to how coding changed my relationship with math. There's a kind of praxis and experimentation that blends ethics and optimization in a way that I find deeply satisfying. For the first time in my career I feel I'm in a position to define a way of being in the world, and ours is: do the right thing well, always.
Anyway, we'll see how naive I feel about all that in a few years. On that note, I've spent time re-reading my past notes on here and I'm pleasantly surprised at the kind of pride I felt for authenticity, transparency, and a real attempt at putting words to non-trivial feelings and thoughts. I hope I can continue that for the rest of my life.
In general, I feel I'm at a good spot in life. I'm grateful to have very few concerns that last, and I'm eager for what lies ahead. I also continue to contrast this life with my inner life, where most everything falls away peacefully. I feel like a young child often in awe of nearly everything, with a warm but fragile receptiveness to the world and an unknown knowledge that this present moment is always all there is.
That said, on a recent acid trip (been a few years since the last one prior to this), I was reflecting on being a dimensionless point bridging two infinities. One infinity was the external world, the other was the internal. Both equally large, and realizing that there's such a profound beauty in spending our existence exploring both despite the impossibility of ever understanding. It reminds me, almost constantly, that the truest things are those that we know without understanding. Things like our breathing, our heart beating, eyes blinking. These things just are, as everything just is, without the disassociation of subject and object, free from the world of the mind, which is all simply illusion.
theartofmadeline
dededos
andulkaphoto
izzy806
gummygunk
