For me, healthy living consists of sleeping well, a clean diet, frequent exercise, journaling, meditation, and socializing. Once in a while I let stress get the better of me and this causes my life to start spiraling and sliding out of control: deadlines start getting missed, emails pile up, I lose sight of my goals and life just gets overwhelming. It’s not pretty. Like any engineer, after such times in my life I do a post-mortem of what went wrong and time and time again I’ve found one or more of these crucial habits disappeared causing others to disappear in a chain reaction.

People have been asking me what I’m doing with my life, what my next steps are, where I’m going to be living, what my goals are, when I’m getting married, how many grandkids I’m going to have…. I wish I could tell them - because I sure as hell don’t know. Life’s really unpredictable. What I do have instead is a rough outline of what I hope to achieve over the next decade or so.

A simple thing, on paper. Get a piece of it out and start writing. Or typing - doesn’t really matter. Anything and everything that comes to mind. It’s weird and unnatural at first - push through it. Save it, or burn it. Don’t overthink it. Wait a few days, and do it again, and again, and keep doing it. Four years into it and I’m just beginning to grasp the immensity of the benefits this simple habit has brought to my life - so I hope to share some of them with you.

Occasionally I speak with people considering an opportunity to move away from the place they call home to somewhere entirely new - be it for work, school, temporarily or indefinitely. I remember myself making that decision and the questions I had swirling around in my head. Hopefully this assortment of words provides some insight or reassurance to someone else in a similar situation. I spent the first 19 years of my life around one major city - Sacramento.

The idea for the title of my site as well as the best description of my life philosophy I’ve read so far originally came from a post of Tim Urban’s I read a long time ago. The basic premise (though he does a much more wonderful job of explaining it and you should go read it now) is that as humans we are somewhere on the spectrum of consciousness. This somewhere is likely higher than that of a beetle’s, and considerably higher than that of a plant’s.