{PROLOGUE} 🐛
In my life, there are roughly two important milestones that have molded me into the quirky 27 year old writing to you today.
The first was reactively choosing an unconventional path in the beginning of my 20s. I leapfrogged to East Africa for four months in a time where people around me were fast-tracking into glitzy career paths of their young unadulterated dreams. I had no idea that a 4-month stint in Tanzania would cascade into shaping my worldview: a deeply invested interest in observing worldly cultures and philosophies, prioritizing lived experience above all. It was the first time I realized I could be whoever I wanted. A kind of social liberation. On the fringes of safaris and savannas, I’d quickly learn to appreciate concepts like beauty, pleasure, and privilege and form opinions on each.
The second milestone was proactively shedding all of the limiting beliefs and heavy masks that plagued my sense of self-concept. Being glued to Toronto for all of 2020 was probably a divine blessing, because it forced me to sit down and interiorize all the mischief in my head — the perfectionist part, the relentless romantic, the contrarian clown. The gulf between who I ought to be and who I could be increasingly widened, twisting and transforming into unrecognizable territory. But I could feel myself unravelling the cocoon in favour of new fluttering mindsets: a maturing man who expresses, a curious mind who experiments, and a spontaneous soul who entertains.
A frame I’m crystallizing: A life lived intuitively is a highly nutritious one.
With the help of writers and creatives who are much more eloquent than I am, I’ve also been juggling a few profound questions around this nebulous idea of maturity:
What is living your “best life” supposed to look like?
How does the way you care for yourself and others change with increasing freedom and maturity?
How do you know that you’ve reached your calling, and when do you commit?
Then comes the torrents of ~Big Questions~ rushing intensely at my psyche: how happy am I with myself right now? How do I feel about growing up so quickly?
Okay, before we get caught in the spidery struggle of over-philosophizing life in the late 20s, I want to mark this piece as the last chapter of my formative years. I've always been a fan of building miniature time capsules for Future Sam to dig up, and it's fitting that I line up this winding trail with my final days in South America.
So here’s my scrapbook of memories that mark my transition into completely new planes of life: views from an unexpected nomadic life, chronicles on cultivating interpersonal relationships, and future-looking commitments to ease into the reality of a full-time artist. I'll do my best to tackle those head-scratching questions above, but I'm much more excited to reveal a series of “scrapshots” that have most vividly coloured this era of growing up. Yalla, habibi!
{ACT I: INDEPENDENCE} 🪲
If I were ever reincarnated in another life like the Buddhists and Hindus preach, I'd want to be a grasshopper. One with well-built hind legs, ready to take flight at a moment's notice. One with antennas sensitive to the sounds and sensations of the outside. One with a pair of sensory membranes tucked under its airy abdomen, adept at relating and responding to the shouts and songs from its fellow insects. One with a mind programmed to just take the leap whenever a delicious opportunity arises.
While this extended metaphor has a bit of hyperbole, I did fully embody the spirit of a grasshopper without ever realizing. This might be a shocker to some, but I never intended to take up a cross-country conquest when I boarded the one-way flight to Istanbul in 2021. The snap decision to uproot myself again, after only four brief months in New York, was driven by an important jump into the scorching land of technology startups. If I were a young adult novel protagonist, this is probably how my narrator’s reel would read:
POV, August 2021: A starry-eyed Sam gazed wistfully out the window of the afternoon Q train to the imposing Manhattan skyline in its sunny glory, promising the very promised land that he'd be right back.
Naked and exposed to the unfamiliar environment of the Middle East, I set out to absorb as many formative experiences as I could. Within months of being on the road, I reoriented focus to my emerging intuition, and this eventually grew to ways I could actively listen to my physical body. From hours of slow strolls beside the Bosphorus Strait around Arnavutköy, I learned that there's a thin line between independence and isolation, but that in moderate doses, both are inherently healthy for you.
Life on the road is not always glamorous, but at least it guarantees space. Leaning into introversion, introspecting with strangers, engaging with art — severely underrated skills in the moment, but very invaluable for developing my independence. I tell myself: I’m not abandoning my home castle to go corral a suite of nameless kingdoms. I’m playing a game of collection and curation. This is my victory lap: the one last chance I can explore without consequence, to step away from the regular routines for a short while.
My eventual willingness to bounce beyond the borders of Turkey started to warp the texture of the remote journey: from mindless meandering to intentional investigating. I wanted to open up the heartbeats of the cities and cultures I traversed. This was like a style of rapid prototyping: I'd immerse in a given place for at least a month and then observe the micro-level changes to my emotions. In what ways had I changed? Had the immersion made me better? Do I see a potential home here?
Seasoned writers often romanticize, criticize, or otherwise de-stigmatize their personal connection to cities, and I think it's a charming angle to help make sense of how you view a “good lifestyle” when it comes to choosing a home (by extension, this is a choice of independence). After five months of desert life, Sasha Chapin describes the mood of attaching to cities as a matter of maximizing:
“You go to cities for commerce, optionality, stimulation, sex, culture, bright lights, and the feeling of being relevant. Cities tell you that, whatever human life is about, you are right on top of it. New York instructs you, through a million signals, subtle and otherwise, that you are part of the heart of all that matters. To own that city is to be assured that you’re the royalty of the world, to be sure that you’re getting the maximum juice out of your short lifespan.”
If the point about "owning" a city to maximize the zest of life were true, then aren't I making a massive sacrifice by grasshoppering around so much? My endless curiosity pulls me one way, while potential stability pushes me to another.
After almost two years of living like a wandering camel nomad, I try to convince myself that this is normal. The ordeal of settling, grounding, pausing — it's like a birthing and decaying process, full of organs and shedding and blood. But then I am reborn, whether in the form of a beady-eyed grasshopper or not, and I adjust. I assert my scrappiness onto a replicating array of blank canvases, trusting that the mid-20's period is all about abstract trial-and-error. Trying to uncover what home means, testing out configurations in crazy wilderness. And part of this testing process is flirting with a city's heartbeat to uncover what best fits your maturing needs.
On gloomier days on the road, I boomerang back to Venkatesh Rao’s1 takes on being nomadic and illegible:
“Nomadism has almost nothing to do with the rooted-living behavior it nominally resembles, travel. When voluntarily chosen, nomadism is not a profession, lifestyle, or restless spiritual quest. It is a stable and restful state of mind where constant movement is simply a default chosen behavior that frames everything else. True nomads decide they like stable movement better than rootedness, and then decide to fill their lives with activities that go well with movement
If I have romanticized nomadism it is because nomadism is a fundamentally romantic state of being. If you can sustain it, it is somehow fulfilling without any further need for achievement or accomplishment. The pursuit of success is, for the rooted, the price they must pay for immobilizing themselves geographically.”
Then, this is my version of storybook romance. I want to carry the aesthetic edginess of Paris, bluntly striving for perfection but savouring the creative process to the fullest. I want to capture the mesmerizing flavours of Bangkok, beckoning with its embrace of tradition-laced modernity. I want to bottle the contrast of Rio de Janeiro, where nature scenescapes coalesce with a cosmopolitan cocktail, along with its shade of grime. I want to sponge up the cultural cores and controlled chaos of Istanbul, completely boundless in its beauty. I want to catalogue the intrinsic inspirations of Brooklyn, so that I can return to revitalize my soul, again and again.
But it’s selfish to want to have it all, at least all at once. As my all-time favourite business buddha says, strategy is about choosing what not to do. I think what I'm converging on is a prism of patterns collected from my time spent in vastly different cultures. By flipping through these mosaics, I feel confident that I'll be re-integrating into a life in New York with new luggage, transporting thoughtful trinkets in the form of vivid memories and spoils of a war waged against my old identities.
I've learned that being totally receptive to these labyrinthine pathways and infinite choices offer so much richness to your whole being, as a makeshift acid test to your perceived identities and ideals. But I have to be clear that this channel of leveling up is not isolated to untamed travel, and does not mean you should surrender yourself to roam freely. I think the more practical principle is one of opening. Open every ounce of yourself to the goodness and unexpectedness that blows your way — opening your eyes, your heart, your mind, your hands. Combine that with an action-first mentality, and you’ll be catching unbelievable experiences like they’re rare fluorescent butterflies in no time.
I have endless gratitude for every local, villager, foreigner, expat, nomad, host, guide, and street cat I’ve met on the way. It’s impossible to sum up how much each interaction, each conversation, and each collaboration has influenced my growth in a million microscopic ways. Instead, here’s a heartwarming compilation of the best moments, in scrapbook form:
It seems to me like the starry-eyed 20’s ideal of living your best life takes on wildly different shapes, where the nomadic story is more than pithy promises of happiness-filled freedom.
With the end of my independence arc and nomadic isolation, I'm ready to leap into an intimately interdependent lifestyle. My new motto: Catch feelings, not flights!
{ACT II: INTERDEPENDENCE} 🐝
One of my favourite journal entries is titled friendship philosophy, from late 2021. I look back fondly on this piece because it has since sprouted so many meaningful dialogues with random strangers and has fueled many inner monologues that I obsess over. One excerpt from the essay:
“But as we mature more into the dizzying, unforgiving environment of ~The Wild West of Mid-20s Responsibility~, friendships gradually shift underneath our feet like tectonic plates. A heightening volcano of external pressures and relentless interactions can be equal parts exhilarating and distracting. You realize there's an important tension: the human desire to meet and interact with new people vs. sticking to meaningful connections that already exist.”
(1) I’ve been slowly marinating thoughts about adult friendships, especially on how much they mutate over time. I like the weight that “mutation” implies here because you can never predict the trajectory of 20’s-friendships: they can blossom remarkably through reignited passions or opportune reunions, or they can fracture and fade by a lack of intentionality. The 20’s also adds another sticky wrench to the mix. People enter continuous loops of transition and integration, donning updated costumes as they attempt to reinvent meaningful aspects of their lives. The transitions that have the biggest impact on personal identity — location, community, career — often exert the most significant friction on friendship, but are practically inevitable as our identities morph with maturity.
The silver lining is that it's never too late to resurrect buried friendships, just as much as it’s never too late to welcome new friends into the fold. After all, a steady stream of characters will keep emerging like a never-ending carnival game of whack-a-mole. It’s useful to remember that the Late 20’s is a period characterized by fluidity and priority. The “optimal” next step is to decide where to place your care and attention so your battery for social connection doesn’t get sucked dry. Only then can you harmonize your personal progress with the paths of the people around you, and invest in those you truly give a shit about.
That last part sounds painfully obvious, but it extends to a larger cloud of physics-inspired philosophies that I call friendship velocity and friendship density. My theory is that the long-tail of meaningful connections we make follow a barbell model: brand-new friendships can be quickly cultivated through short bursts of contained intensity and intimacy2, while age-old friendships can be nurtured through the same intensity of being deeply invested in each other’s lives.
These are dense relationships with diamond-like durability, because even if the first side is filled with fleeting encounters (as most of my scrapshots illustrate), the impact on your emotional self can be surprisingly enduring. Meanwhile, the pals at the tail-end who have helped you check off juicy milestones also flourish because of the built-up momentum from years of shared commitment, so long as you keep the flywheel flowing.
I might be over-complicating something simple, but it helps to reflect on the role that all the various characters play in my life. There are existing friends that you pour into, ones you don’t see too often but charged with fiery enthusiasm right at “what’s up”, a hunger to unpack everything substantial that has happened since last meeting. Then there are those that you trickle into, punctuated with more frequency, proximity, and lightness; you get to witness their gradual evolution over smaller speed bumps. I feel comforted to know that my only job is to figure out whether I'm still happy in these friendships or not.
More than shared interests or associated activities, I think shared struggle is the best leading indicator for the relationship’s long-term survival rate (or more poetically, thrival rate). When you confide in someone at critical times — life pivots, existential crises, grand resets — and vice versa, a deeper undertone of camaraderie emerges. The mutual suffering normalizes the reality of being fallible humans, and it warms us to each other’s sensibilities through the feeling of being seen. It transcends the problem of proximity because a significant piece of you is embedded within them, seeding trust and weaving the web of mutual commitment.
This principle is exactly why mates like Genn and Aaron (Scrapshot 13) continue to inspire me from halfway around the world, even though I might see them ~once every quarter. The density developed over years of varied involvement in each other’s lives, observing shared struggles and lending firsthand support, is hard to understate. On the flip side, the quality of newer, nascent friendships can still be driven by velocity. I lean on recent relationships formed in South America that also hold so much weight despite their immaturity: from camping four nights in the Amazon Rainforest with a pack of Dutch women, to inconspicuous meet-cute encounters in Argentina and Peru that started as trivial courtesies, but quickly morphed into substantial connections about lifestyle trade-offs and value systems.
Talking about intention, the priority for my late 20’s is to keep both sides of the garden tended: the beautiful buds who have grown up with the old Scrappy Sam and supported my chaotic twists and turns, and the sprouting seeds of new creative conspirators who will enter the stage as my new artistic identities bloom.
(2) When I talk about interdependence, friendships are the natural vector of connection because all it takes is just one other person. But I think the holy grail of late 20’s fulfillment is tackling the need for belonging, the conscious choice to be part of something larger than yourself. The desire to find social-market fit becomes urgent as your interests and curiosities follow a new rhythm. This is a time where singular personalities upgrade into collective associations, satiating the urge to connect deeply and co-create meaning with others. In this quest of searching for “my people”, I want my strengthened sense of independence to act as a compass, reorienting my mental bearings and putting out a bat signal to the people who energize me the most.
Since it pays to be proactive, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role and design of third spaces as a fruitful breeding ground for organic community. One of the core tribulations of adulthood is learning where to find and form new relationships that best fit your evolving needs. What does an ideal third space look and feel like?
A quintessentially “good” coffee shop means much more to me than just the quality of their Colombian roasts and Ethiopian pourovers, and extends beyond the feel-good ambience used for work hubs or first dates. Rather, the shop becomes a playground that will activate my full sensory range. The second-hand taste of warm pastry, the subtle smell of ceremonial matcha, the reassuring touch of mahogany decor, the tender white noise of a dozen criss-crossing conversations, and the complete panoramic view of each small speck in the space, softly working in concert to create a unique universe that can only be lived just this once, before hard-resetting itself.
Even more importantly, the space acts as fertile soil for serendipity, ushering in ebbs and flows of different humans for any degree of potential contact. As someone wise once said, all it takes is for some random stranger to appear once to change your life completely. Corny, but I love the optimistic jingle that an everyday choice can bring. And while the coffee shop is the most obvious example, I’ve been finding success by hanging around specialized scenes that facilitate the same energy. In recent months, I’ve joined a few collectives that embody this vision for connectedness:
I’m fascinated by the trajectory of these intentional, hyper-localized communities because their sole purpose is to provide structure to the search, while leaving just enough serendipity to retain the organic nature of the connections. There’s also an important element of self-selection and identity alignment that helps preserve the integrity of these spaces — birds of a colourful feather will flock together. Take for example the parallels drawn by The Neighborhood NYC, a new initiative to create a contained block of interconnectedness in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:
“Combines the serendipity of a college campus, the co-creation of Burning Man, the agency of Silicon Valley, the vigor of a Midwestern high school track coach, and the culture of NYC.”
“The vision of a co-owned multi-family building with a solarpunk school and coworking space (think Montessori x MIT Media Lab x Aristotle x Chobani).”
I admit, the branding sounds both grandiose and goofy, probably appealing to a hyper-specific niche of humans. I’d take a leaf out of The Commons’ playbook, because their ethos of home outside of home resonates louder, one where “play, curiosity, and creativity define the culture”. Music to my ears! But to knock the efforts of grassroots community builders is to dismiss the sheer difficulty of wrangling people purely around the joys of camaraderie and companionship.
I reference these live-time budding communities because these are exactly the groups I want to surround myself with for the rest of my 20s. To me, this is peak interdependence: when you’re able to find a tribe of people who just get you, who shares in your struggles, who strives to push you, challenge you, and encourage you. That’s what I want to come home to.
When I place these building blocks side-by-side and spin these different shapes in my head — a thorny game of friendship tetris and community geometry — I’m left with the ultimate takeaway that acts as a guiding North Star for my late 20’s motivation:
“Don’t surround yourself with “smarter” people. The trick is to surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not.”3
My independence tour de force has shaped my worldview on what being free looks and feels like. With a more mindful outlook on the virtues of being a full-fledged adult, I’ve refined my taste palette of people I want to be around, charging the circuit for interdependence. The dream of freedom to pursue my versions of creative expression sets the stage for the last piece of my scrapbook, in which I commit to a big bold intention that my 20-year old self would’ve never imagined in a million years. Here’s the pièce de résistance to come full circle: intention.
{ACT III: INTENTION} 🐌
I’ve since done away with intense goal setting exercises and frothy new year’s resolutions, but if I had to distill ONE intention that is calling me in 2023, it is:
But like, what does this even mean? Like the Herculean feat of scaling a 5000 meter high glacier-filled mountain, this phrase oozes with dramatic effect — from nomadic tech bro to full-time artist?! Let me try to extract the madness from each word:
To “make it” gives off the impression that there has to be a supreme success formula, like scaling my artwork to a grand exhibition hall or deriving ~80% of my income from my creative work. But setting these arbitrary milestones would be spitting in the face of early 20’s Sam, who by all accounts had mastered the value of doing something for its own sake, a lover of process over outcome.
To me, the hallmark of “making it” expands to the mindset of being free — if I feel the aliveness of every single day through the act of living and creating, then that’s all that matters to me. This is a sentiment that is hard to measure and quantify as a traditional goal, that I've consciously designed to be "unoptimizable".
“Full-time” is next in the hot seat, and the logical inference might be that I will transition my life into a newly evolved 9-5. One important note about my current 9-5 is that I'm on track to make a massive career bet that will shape my next professional decade: a charged entry into the urgent universe of climate tech4. On paper, splitting focus for both the technical & artistic sounds like a classic recipe for disaster: how can you go full-time on two things?
I want to emphasize that I do not want to completely uproot my built-up routines and rituals. As long as I find dedicated time in both my day job and night hustle to create, I'm hoping the "yin-yang, work-play, etc etc" duality absolves the need to drop my path as a technologist completely. I visualize a synergy similar to that of bumblebees and flowers: where my vocation cross-pollinates and inspires blooms of artistic action. In this way, the label of “full-time” serves as an orientation to life — seeing, thinking, and feeling artistically — rather than a blocking constraint.
The most nebulous part of the intention is the word artist, which happens to be where I spent the most time ruminating on how to neatly define. So I traced moments of my past to summon the times where I felt the most creative, and the associated activities that I can use as stepping stones. By looking backwards, three foundations emerge: my quirky personas developed in the thick of the performing arts, my emotional sides formed from a rolodex of memoir pieces and flash poems, and my well-mannered attempts at constructing visual art once in a blue moon. Phew, it looks like I’m not totally empty-handed when thinking about how to articulate my artistic identity.
By crafting this personal pyramid of artistry — performance, language, visual — I head into the unmarked creative terrain with a bit more confidence, because at least I know where to place my time, energy, and attention. Here’s more flavour into how I’ve applied the pyramid model in practice:
The base of the pyramid embraces the performer's mindset, where the tenets of improv have penetrated every aspect of my life5. I view stage improv as the rawest, most generative form of art that I'm most confident in. From the early days of playing as Riff in Westside Story at age 15 to gaining the amateur-level chops at The Second City at age 21, performance has become such a cornerstone of my once-hidden artistic affinity. These days it’s less about actually getting on stage (a possible resurgence one day), and more about metamorphosing the skillsets as practical improv — showing the ultimate party tricks, hosting workshops for startup founders, yes and-ing the conversational volley in spontaneous dates, and finessing my way through new cities.
The middle of the pyramid is all about words. One of my future stretch goals is to write a fiction novel, steeped in magical realism and inspired by my favorite authors — Murakami, Kafka, Borges, Ozeki. But the process sounds harrowing. I’ll probably be traversing wildly varied forms of language in the meantime, particularly memoir and poetry. I think of crafting poetry akin to collecting drywood in a damp rainforest. Just as camping in the Amazon jungle taught me, you need to observe deeply to find the best materials. It can be a very frustrating procedure to sift through the wilted branches and unusable timber, but it’s a practice with massive payoff at the end.
I find the life of a poet fascinating because they seem to work in the extremes: alone, attempting to stitch together a world out of nothing; and connected, bridging their emotional interiority with human-to-human authenticity. You can read guides, tutorials, books, join communities, attend open mics, build writing groups, and cover yourself in literary inspiration. But in this realm the only way to get better is to do the work (aka keep publishing garbage and WIP drafts) and live a life worth living.
The third element around visual art is what I’m most intrigued to test because it literally allows me to get my hands dirty, to transfigure my wacky ideas into creatures of unique form and fashion. Despite what the cheesy smile in Scrapshot 19 suggests, I’ll be the first to say that me and pottery don’t really mix that well — my way with the clay is quite lacking and doesn’t feel like a natural extension of my creative juices. We’ll just have to dabble with other mediums — if I can teach myself software engineering, surely I can pick up a practice like acrylic painting, right?
My biggest concern with embedding the artist’s way into every fabric of my lifestyle is facing an amplified version of imposter syndrome. I may have shed all doubts about my abilities as a product builder by hacking my way to technical prowess, but the unfortunate difference here: I have no existing background in the creative scene. I didn’t take any formal arts education, I have no works to showcase in a portfolio, I lack the established network to find my co-conspirators for cool projects. But I remind myself that the illustrious Murakami didn’t start writing fiction until he was 29. There’s the kicker: I have the will to start, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still scared.
I have no doubt it’ll be difficult to combat my fearful mind, who will plunge into the recesses of my chronicled childhood and claim that art never is, and never will be, my calling in life. Despite these mental whirlwinds, I head into this next phase ready to embrace every second of discomfort. The dominant common thread that neatly wraps these three art forms is my love for storytelling, which both anchors my self-expression and drives momentum. I’m grateful for all the lived experiences and tender communities that consistently function as my renewable energy source. After all, I am always looking for the most extreme version of an experience.
I started to sketch how I could make this new identity a reality, in a format I like to call dream drafts. The premise of this exercise is super simple. First, you dream. You assemble your fragmented aspirations and inspirations that are lodged inside your heart. You spawn a list of these seemingly crazy possibilities, and let each simmer in your brain. Then, you must dare to do. Start small and execute one action that will make one of those dreams a little more legible, a little more believable. I’m hoping that if I run with this approach long enough, I won’t even recognize myself by the time I hit 30.
Scrapshot 21 represents the live trial after a fortnight of dream drafts and a blazing set of mental gymnastics. Is my poetry even good enough? What will the seasoned lyricists in the room think? But this is why I’m here: the purpose of expressing truths that I only I can express, and the desire to dance with the same type creatives that charge me up.
I read my flash poem clairvoyant voyager, which applied the motif of outer space to illustrate the early stages of romantic love. In my terms, it's a cocktail of melancholy, sensuality, and lyricality. Shoutout to my favorite Mongolian momma Bolor, who encouraged me to craft something at the previous event and kept me accountable to share just a morsel, even if it felt like morse code to me.
When this idea of seriously pursuing art popped into my head on a cold November night, I wanted to laugh it off as another one of my silly schemes to chase a new type of novelty. I confronted a sincere question of why I care so much about being artistic and creative in the first place, especially if it signals such a massive departure to where I’ve taken my life up to this point.
My current answer boils down to two words: purpose and people. I realized that art is the only medium that allows me to be me. Meaning: any idea I want to explore, any modicum of meaning I want to express, any connection I want to pursue… the MVP (maximally-viable pathway) is art. Simply, the people I want to surround myself with have a similar intensity of spirit: one that relishes in the chaotic messiness of creation, one that appreciates the flavour of aesthetics in everyday things, one that prioritizes wonder and imagination over concreteness, one with performative playfulness.
The breadcrumbs from my personal blog reassure me that I was planting all the right seeds even a year ago, while I pranced around the museums in Madrid. A glimpse into the germination from my old piece titled art forms:
“Art forms are simultaneously a window, a mirror, and a microphone. Art is giving your voice tangibility — something is artistic because it has soul, heart, and essence that only you can imbue. Art forms are a container that enables the delivery of a fundamental human craving: connection.”
{EPILOGUE} 🦋
These days I ask myself whether this new direction in life will make me happy in the long-run, because of all the struggles and sacrifices that will follow me into the unforgiving void. But then I counter: is happiness really the end game to all of this?
This apt quote from Michelle Jia's “Self Care is an Illusion” opened new flood gates on defining feelings of happiness vs. investing deeply in life:
"I’m not that happy, I began, but. Given this time in my life, I think I have something that’s more important to me than happiness. I struggled to put this thing into words. Embeddedness, maybe? Or, rather… I feel very interested in my life. I find my life very interesting. I feel like an animal in the forest, with all of her feet on the ground. I have many things to grip onto, and I have things I want to do. I feel deeply involved in my life. I am invested in it. I do not want my life to end."
I‘ve also been finding it hard to describe my current state of being as this nebulous quality of ~happy~. The pangs of wistfulness and loneliness still ring true, as I stare back into the vibrant vortex of Brooklyn, a world temporarily left behind.
But with so many recent moments of pleasure and excitement in South America, doesn't that dissonance feel a bit strange? Should it? Perhaps satisfied fits better as a more diluted emotion. No, that isn't quite right either — I'm definitely more than satisfied with my current direction in life. After all, my second round of country-hopping mixes together familiarity and freshness in a way that oscillates between intensity and intentionality, with just the Goldilocks warmth I'm looking for. I may have lost a bit of momentum from the collectives and communities I joined over the past year, but the beauty of these groups is that there’s always room on the boat if I decide to set sail with them again.
On another corner of the internet, Ava’s “patterns and progress” expresses a state of being so deeply woven in my current lifestyle — the fact that I’m too good at jumping:
“When I started this blog I was scared I was someone who could never stick with anything. I’m too good at leaving, too good at packing. Meaning: too good at jumping into a new life. But now I know that I’m also capable of persistence over time. I’ve proven that to myself. My need for exploration is tempered by my need to put down roots. I will always be the same, but… I am constantly shapeshifting, adapting, and evolving.”
Both Michelle and Ava point to choosing a high quality of life. Being so immersed in something, or many things, pushes you to prowl like an animal, fully alert and attentive to the world created underneath your footprints. To search for the social gravity enhanced by the energy of other souls on similar journeys. To care about something so much that you are completely absorbed by it and in it. To transition from freeform exploration to anchored adventurousness, in the name of true rootedness.
Living on the road with a backpack for the past two years has served one ultimate purpose: to make me entirely comfortable in my own skin, no matter what the occasion or context or environment. This mindset queues up as the backbone for my late 20’s, because the artist’s way is a road paved with spikes and tar and potholes and dynamite. If I’m not careful, I might trigger an explosion, or worse yet, an implosion of my maturing self.
But maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s entirely the point. Maybe the process of becoming someone who I can’t recognize is designed to be severely treacherous. Maybe towing the line between utter self-accepting weirdo and complete charismatic world builder is more than a nice thought, and becomes a constant source of pride.
I feel a strange sense of nostalgic novelty6 as I close another important chapter of my life. I’m collecting fragments of stability, hoping to clean up my scrambled jigsaw. Some pieces will inevitably click together as I find the fit, but some don’t fit at all. Again, that’s totally fine! See, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself. I say, play your own way! Don’t dance the way the public wants you to, like some circus monkey stripped of its free will. What’s wrong with feeling good?
This is what the rest of 2023 is going to be all about: acting on those impulses, curating an assembly of artsy muses, and breathing life into unformed emotions. As an homage to the late Joan Didion, the end of this scrapbook marks the beginning of the year(s) of magical making. I’m willing to start over as many times as necessary, to make sure the next installment of my narrative is filled with kaleidoscopic streams of my creations — no matter how misshapen their forms may be.
A note to my future struggling self: When you're chasing your dreams, your job isn't to figure out how things are going to work out. Not knowing keeps all the possibilities open, it keeps all the worlds alive. Just keep showing up :)
Sending off the mid-20s to the scrapyard,
A Pre-27, Savoury Sam 🙆♂️
Applied examples: a week-long jungle trek in the Brazilian Amazon, a bedouin-style mobile camp in the Saudi Arabian desert, or a silent vipassana retreat in rural California… the heavy-lifters of formative bond building!
Inspiration from Ribbonfarm (2014)
Current fellowship programs I’m enrolled in: Terra.do (Climate Science), OPF Academy (Climate Strategy), Climatebase (Climate Tech)
A concept I made up: nostalgic novelty