A mind at work.
In public.

Green Tea

“Want to go grab some green tea?”

I loved hearing that question.

There was a Starbucks in the adjoining building, and we'd often walk over together. She usually had something she wanted to talk about. Something she'd discovered, a question she'd been considering, or an idea she couldn't wait to share.

She was relatively new to product management, having come from Supply Chain. Curious, thoughtful, analytically strong, and always interested in why things worked the way they did.

And why they couldn't work differently.

We spent a lot of time exploring those questions. Sometimes we'd start with a particular problem and end up somewhere neither of us expected.

I loved that.

She'd often come along with something new she'd been exploring. A possibility she'd uncovered, an idea about how we might make something better for our customers.

Her excitement energized me. It reminded me how much I loved imagining what might be possible and finding a way to make it real for someone.

More of Who I Am

I've been building a small vinyl record library.

It's interesting because, even when records were commonplace, I wasn't particularly drawn to them. I had a few, but I gravitated toward tapes, CDs, and eventually digital music.

So this isn't really about nostalgia.

Something about vinyl appeals to me now. I think it's connected to what I enjoy about making my morning cappuccino. I could make the process more convenient, but I enjoy the small steps, the attention, and the simple pleasure of doing it myself.

I spend much of my time imagining possibilities, making decisions, and thinking through several things at once.

But I've always valued knowing when to give something my full attention. When to set everything else aside and simply be present.

That's part of what drew me to vinyl.

Not individual songs selected from an endless catalog, or music playing in the background while I do something else.

When I sit down with a record, I want to listen. Nothing else.

To be still. To be open. To give myself completely to the experience.

Choose a record. Place it on the turntable. Listen to side one, turn it over, and listen to side two.

No skipping. No intermixing. No deciding what should come next.

The artist has already made those decisions.

My gift to myself is simply to follow along.

Finding the right recordings has become its own wonderful exploration.

I've listened across genres and different periods of artists' careers, paying attention to what moves me. Sometimes a recording connects immediately. Sometimes I appreciate what I hear without feeling particularly drawn to it. And occasionally, something catches me completely by surprise.

I've discovered that I'm not necessarily drawn to particular artists or styles, but to particular moments in their journeys.

A voice that has changed. A performance that seems to carry something of what the artist has lived, questioned, and come to understand.

And especially, artists who seem no longer concerned with proving anything.

They aren't trying to impress me or make sure I appreciate what they can do.

There's an ease to their expression. A willingness to let the music breathe.

And I've begun to recognize what that ease makes possible for me.

I become more at ease with myself.

I can simply listen. Absorb. Feel whatever surfaces.

Sometimes a recording moves me almost to tears, without my being able to explain exactly why.

It isn't taking me somewhere else or into someone else's story.

I'm arriving somewhere within myself.

Sometimes reconnecting with a part of me I've forgotten or overlooked, quietly packed away amid everything else in life.

Other times discovering something about myself I haven't fully appreciated. A depth, a complexity, a feeling I hadn't realized was there.

And often, the two flow together. Remembering and discovering, without any particular boundary between them.

What I've come to appreciate is that these experiences don't end when the music stops.

Sitting down with one of my records has become a little retreat. A getaway without having to go anywhere at all.

For a while, I can simply be there. Listening, absorbing, allowing whatever the music brings forward.

And when the record finishes, I get up, turn off the turntable and speakers, and carefully return it to its sleeve.

I step back into the rest of my day.

A little more open. More appreciative. More porous to the world and to myself.

Not quite the same person who sat down.

I was looking at a sailboat this morning and noticed the line holding it in place.

I could see the tension in the line. I could see its effect. But at the waterline, it disappeared. Whatever was holding the boat where it was existed somewhere beneath the surface.

It made me wonder how often this is true in our own lives.

What is holding me where I am that I cannot see directly, but whose tension I can feel?

Am I anchored because I choose to be? Or because something beneath the surface is holding me there?

Some visions don't fail. They go dormant. Something survives: an insight, a need, a way of seeing the problem. Then conditions change, and what eventually grows may be something the original vision couldn't yet contain.

Preserving what remains true while reopening what can be better.

The longer I live with an idea, the more clearly I see it. The more convinced I become.

What feels like clarity to me can feel like finality to someone whose own thought is just beginning to take shape.

I wonder how many ideas never became what they could have because they met certainty before they found their own voice.

You can feel when someone is speaking from inside a shell they built to survive an environment.

And every so often, if the conversation slows down enough, something softer appears underneath it for a second. Not confidence. Not performance. Just less protection. Space. Breath.

I keep thinking about how rarely environments allow that now.

Some early interests are not abandoned paths. They are early expressions of an underlying orientation that only becomes fully visible much later.

The material changed. The underlying orientation never really did.

The orientation keeps revealing itself.