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The Most Beautiful Thing We Can Experience

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." — Albert Einstein

I am thinking of my life, and much of my time for the past short while has been on building and business. I feel science and awe to be at the heart of my interest and pursuit of much of my dreams. I feel art and mystery to be genuinely deeply meaningful. I feel I want to cultivate these more in my life, from the exploration, the awe, the creation, and the curiosity.

I feel this to be interacted with curiosity and equanimity. As I pursue cultivating prayer and meditative practice, it is quintessential to cultivate my artistic practice and my scientific curiosity, as I want to have the experience of mystery permeate my life.

Honestly, I need to admit I haven't had the most personal feelings of epistemic humility, the awe and awareness of just how much I don't know.

I try to orient and cultivate myself towards something that resembles an agential, open minded, and optimistic approach to life. I feel I've been doing a lot of creation and with the utility of AI tools, I've felt like I can create anything and learn anything, I haven't felt an awareness of the uncharted universe and fabric of knowledge.

I just remember the awe I felt with physics and cosmology as a kid, the awe of evolution and biological diversity, the awe of political, governmental, and economic innovation and systems.

I've realized—balancing conviction and wonder—just how much my startup context and my math background have influenced the way I perceive and view the world.

I have been wondering about the nature of explanation. As a scientist and mathematician, I have sought generality and shunned the toolkit cookbook. However I have realized naively that life is itself a pattern that perpetuates, that perpetuation at its core needs to survive. That evolution itself spreads its seeds, that it picks favorites, and those favorites or those toolkits eventually will flourish and then be discarded.

Wrestling with this awareness that my approach towards life doesn't connect with the pursuit of unification, but instead that of adaptive system. Wrestling with how this duals with the pursuit of meaning in life, I've found that the pursuit of meaning and cultivating an adaptable and fit system of thought are almost two fruitful north stars.