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Hi there and welcome to my collection of thoughts and projects. If you find something here that resonates with you, I’d be happy to hear from you1. Now, on to the particulars…
My name is Adam. I’m in my mid-40’s and live in a mid-sized city on the coast amongst the redwoods and pelicans. I live in a disproportionately female household with my wife, my daughter, and a lady dog with one brown and one blue eye. I love sharing a home with these three. My interests are rather wide-ranging: designing and building new things especially from wood and metal, restoring old stuff, cooking, reading, writing, travel, philosophy, walking, fitness, surfing, and a number of others. I’ve noticed that these activities I spend my days with have a common thread. Perhaps the essays here will help me to substantiate that.
Speaking of essays: the word is from the French word essayer, meaning to try. That’s all I’m going for here, just making an attempt to take some thoughts in my head and put them out there for whoever happens to read them. Oh, and there’s some poems and projects too.
I’m a mostly retired mechanical engineer, although I pick up a paid project here and there to keep the saw sharp. Modest living (by American standards), years of steady saving and investing, and many spreadsheets led to this work-as-optional paradigm. FIRE blogs, forums, and books sparked the ideas and helped me with a lot of the strategy and tactics. I reckon this detail is an important backdrop to these essays, though rarely their subject.
Writing down and sharing my thoughts feels like it’s part of a longer arc that I’ve been on these past few years. But “arc” makes it feel like there’s a destination. This seems more like a current, or a tide perhaps…
In any case, I’ve become increasingly interested in paying closer attention—to my inner life, to others, to books, to design and making, to my relation to the physical and non-physical, to the present, and to the strange fact that the present exists at all the strange fact that the present exists at all. Most thoughts begin with something ordinary that turns out to be less ordinary the more I sit with it.
I realized something about myself and my intentions while I was preparing this website2. Despite a longing to share, I often withhold the deeper insights and events of my life. Opening up that part of me is difficult in conversation, even with those close to me, and writing these things down and sending them into the ether seems to scratch an important itch. Writing has always felt like a more natural way for me to communicate than talking anyways.
So, here goes.
Footnotes
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