Hi there and welcome to my collection of thoughts and projects.
My name is Adam. I’m a mid-40’s man and I live in a mid-sized city on the coast between the redwoods and pelicans. I’ve a daughter, a wife, and a dog with one brown and one blue eye. I like to use “I’ve” in place of “I have” not because I’m British but just because I like the way it sounds. My interests are rather wide-ranging, but I think they have a common thread. Perhaps the essays will help substantiate that.
I’m a mostly retired (I don’t love that word) mechanical engineer, although I pick up a consulting job or paid project here and there to keep my saw sharp. I read the book “Your Money or Your Life” sometime around 2015 and chased it with Mr. Money Moustache and Jacob Lund Fisker sometime thereafter. My wife and I were always pretty frugal and efficient with money, but FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) gave us some structure and an endgame. Many spreadsheets and several years of high savings rates later, I found myself with work as optional. I reckon this detail is an important backdrop to what I will be writing about, but not the focus.
I think I will refer to posts as 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.
I haven’t discussed why I’m writing a blog yet. Or why I’m writing at all. That seems important to an “About Me”. 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. Most thoughts begin with something ordinary that turns out to be less ordinary the more I sit with it. Perhaps these essays are one more way of paying closer attention.