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Hola! Sending wishes for a happy new year full of serendipity, beauty, and an ever-growing embrace of the highs and lows that create the contrast essential to the ceaselessly interesting experience of being. I’ve been in Colombia the whole of December drinking a sweet, stiff cocktail of juxtaposition: weeks of paradoxical middle-of-a-metropolitan-city solitude and surrounded on both ends with days of attached-at-the-hip adventure friendship. After not leaving the USA for two and a half years, this dude is real happy to find himself again at large and on the loose in a foreign land! I turned 30 years old yesterday. A decade to me seems a milestone both large and groundless. Amid a posh, perhaps a bit too expensive for my tastes EDM dance party atop the 408 year old wall surrounding the Cartagena city center, I looked out at in impossible sky of fireworks and stage lights feeling the throbbing base wondering, “might I experience some profound change or realization as I cross this threshold of a new decade?” But nothing came up. So I just kept on dancing. I have since seemed to enter a more of a bird’s eye view of my life upon entering this new decade and it’s mostly resulted in gratitude for how I get to spend my time and stoke to keep pursuing and playing with the things I have stumbled my way into. My twenties began marred in confusion. How should I spend my life? Why do we do things the way we do things? I saw no satisfying answer to these questions. I was pouring myself into navigating by cultural maps and leaping through high hoops (to be a fit, materially rich, physician was roughly my highest goal at them time) and it felt all wrong. After pedaling a bicycle across the USA at 21 (the first major act of my life that welled up from an intuition within) I knew that med school was the wrong path for me. But how to move forward in the “right” way? I had no idea. Through wandering out into the unknown, through holding out through rudderless in-between job and adventure periods of tremendous confusion, through the luck of mindful parents who don’t place rigid demands on their kids, through an economic discipline that lent my twenties so much free time — I stand humbled, awed, and stoked to find myself at thirty saturated with creative pursuits, living with freedom found in the light and minimal, and in connection with so many others who inspire me. Perhaps most surprising to me, I find myself with a growing sense of spirituality — something my 20 year old self (an agnostic, biomedical science major in college) would have never expected. This sense was incited by books (The Power of Myth, The Power of Now, Siddhartha, The Snow Leopard, Be Here Now, The Wisdom of Insecurity, and The Denial of Death, being some that most stand out) and stoked by firsthand experience (living among Hawaiian hippies, summers of trail-less solo Rocky Mountain wanderings woven with nights with wise friends in a creekside sauna under the Milky Way, a healthy amount of mind-expanding substances, a mind-blowing ten day Vipassana meditation, and countless other gifts of moments of which I could have never imagined to seek). These remarkable signposts afforded me what I currently consider the gift of gifts: an expanded sense of Self. As of now, of all people, Albert Einstein describes this sense best for me: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” I am continually astonished to feel this as an experienceable truth on a just about daily (though not most of the day or anything yet) basis. A disciplined work-hard-and-crush-it approach seems to find great complement in blurred lines of self, in an expansive, easy bliss I seem to increasingly often be able to let go and drop into, feeling myself part of the infinite vast process we all come from, return to, and it seems to me, are. Of all the gifts of roving about trying to remain open and attuned in the unknown throughout my twenties, this to me seems the greatest one I’ve stumbled into yet. What will come with this new year? Who knows! The unknown, all too often muddled by fears of what could be, is actually the gift that makes life not just livable, but truly and endlessly riveting. I am ceaselessly stoked to be part of this ineffable, continual, flowing, rising and falling, infinitely interwoven, kaleidoscopic process in connection, and communion, with you. Here’s to another year of it! What a crazy gift. With love & stoke, Ethan
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