Musings and Essays

I'll drop occasional reflections on presence, absurdity, values, and the small daily acts that carry meaning.

Life moves fast. These essays don’t. They live in their own eigenzeit – their own time of becoming. Unhurried yet alive in motion, they stretch and settle as they need to.

Attending the Days began as a simple attempt to meet life more fully – with attention, honesty, and a little humor. I write for those who sense there's more to notice, more to live, and more to love in the ordinary rhythm of our days.

These essays breathe where they need to, trusting that insight ripens in its own time. We can’t force understanding into bloom; we can only tend the soil and listen for what grows through us.

The Principles

Each post explores core themes like consciousness, impermanence, absurdity, cultivating your way, and present-moment living offering clarity, presence, and ways toward meaning. Each theme moves through three steady principles informed by Stoic practice and colored with Taoist aesthetic:

1. Perception (enactive contact): the pulse of awareness that frames experience, shaping how world and psyche meet. What we notice—and how we notice—defines the quality of our encounter with reality; it marks the difference between seeing the world and meeting it. Through perception, reality recognizes its own patterning in motion: awareness feels itself through us.
   
   
2. Aware Action (embodied participation):  the gesture that carries awareness into form – the lived dialogue amongst being and doing, presence and service. Through this rhythm, meaning is experienced as participation itself, it becomes lived rather than sought. Aware Action moves without clinging, reaches with yielding, and rests within its own return. It’s the yin and yang of living awareness: stillness expressed as movement, movement returning to stillness.
   
   Aware Action lets perception breathe; it gives shape to what encounter begins. Through Aware Action, we participate in the experience of meaning itself – where being allows doing, and doing presses into being in the spiral of becoming.
   
   
3. Attunement (renewal of coherence):  our self-correcting return that tunes perception and action to what matters most, keeping life in key with integrity and meaning. Attunement opens both inward and outward at once, harmonzing the inner chord of awareness with the larger music of existence. It draws us back into nature’s values and opening us to fuller participation with what seeks to live through us.  It reminds us that coherence isn’t created; it’s remembered. 

Perception explores, Action forms and expresses, Attunement restores: together they spiral through one another as an embodied process of potential. 

To live through these principles is to sense life as process: a field of relationships through which experience unfolds and returns. When we inhabit them consciously, we touch the primacy of relationship: the living reciprocity where Consciousness understands itself through our participation.

Nature's Values

Within that field, three movements recur like the bassline of existence, the quiet currents that give meaning its vitality:

• Resonance: existence vibrating in relationship, where patterns respond to patterns and meaning arises in the betweenness. Each note finds its shape through tension.
• Harmony:  the confluence of opposites where difference generates unity through motion. Harmony listens through tension the way day listens into night — a joining that deepens both. 
• Generosity: nature’s intrinsic givingness — purpose moving from within, potential offered without demand, the quiet abundance sustaining all becoming.
   

In this way, Nature's values integrate the Platonic triad of classical ideals: Truth lives as Resonance felt; Beauty lives as Harmony unveiled; Goodness lives as Generosity embodied.

The essays here draw from both: the principles that shape our participation, and the values that let us feel nature's underlying music. The music that allows us to receive, reflect, release our way with becoming. Together they remind us that we don’t create meaning; we rejoin it. 

An Open Score

These essays offer no blueprint for arrival and promise no certainty. They offer company — colored with imperfection — and a gentle nudge toward introspective reflection. Think of shared sheet music: a few suggested notes, plenty of open page. An open score where emptiness carries possibility across the measures, and muddled threads of interconnectedness hum together into life and meaning. 

Meaning hums in the betweenness: the gap between neurons where meaning sparks, the pause between heartbeats where life unfolds, the space between self and other where love arises. 

Mostly, this space invites daily moments to sing with resonance, stretch toward harmony, and rest in generosity. A way of tuning the ordinary bits of our lives into something quietly meaningful. This is all we really have, anyway.

If you're wonder-laden, thoughtful, occasionally overwhelmed, and still drawn to depth — you’re in the right space.

If you find yourself questioning what matters, noticing the quiet beauty tucked into ordinary hours, or searching for a rhythm that feels both mindful and meaningful, then this space was made for you.

Attending the Days offers thoughtful reflections, grounded philosophy, and gentle guidance to help us live with clarity, presence, and purpose. Each post explores perennial themes: consciousness, impermanence, absurdity, cultivating your way, and mindful living filtered through lived insight and sincere inquiry.

Guided by three steady principles—Perception, Aware Action, and Attunement—we explore how subtle shifts in attention shape a richer, steadier, more examined life.

Whether you're beginning your adult years or reshaping your midlife, parenting with curiosity, or asking different questions at the end of a long day: this is a space to think slowly and live deliberately.

If you find resonance in wry insights, stillness, or clarity through humor, you may already belong here. (Think somewhere between Oliver Burkeman meets Rupert Spira meets Mark Manson meets James Hollis.)

Subscribe now to receive new reflections in your inbox and begin attending to the quiet power tucked into each day.