Eastern Wisdom, Western Routines, and the Art of Being Present

Show Notes

Dan and I sat down to close out 2024, and instead of a hot take we picked up a list — forty year-end questions from Kepano, one of the minds behind Obsidian, that Dan's algorithm had served him. We only made it through a handful, which felt right. The first one, what song will remind you of this year?, sent us sideways into Spotify Wrapped, Dan's eight-hour piano playlists running in the background of a house with two small kids, and a long detour about whether the algorithm counts your ambient listening or just your active clicks. (It counts everything, we decided.) That's the kind of episode this was: less arguing about markets, more taking inventory of where the year actually went.

The harder questions snuck up on us. Dan's date he'll never forget is February 14th — the day he had his prostate removed, a surgery that, between an infection and four months in and out of the hospital, changed his family's whole plan. And then I admitted the thing that had been nagging me: I don't have good answers for most of these. What did you want and get? What did you want and not get? I drew blanks, and the blanks annoyed me. Dan, doing his best impression of his executive coach, reframed it as a question — was this a year of too much stasis? Yeah. That was it exactly. Not a lack of progress, just a lack of punctuation.

Punctuation turned out to be Dan's word for the whole episode. Without the highs and the lows, he said, we forget — and if we forget, time disappears, and time is the one resource you can't make more of. He's not wrong that his relationship with time is broken; he told me about realizing a conversation he thought was a month old had actually happened back in March. We talked about how the pandemic flattened everything into one long identical day, how holidays and decorations are really just society's way of planting signposts in the year so it doesn't all blur together. My fix, such as it is: stop wishing the year away and start putting things in front of me to walk toward.

When I reached for the Tao Te Ching, Dan lit up. His instinct was the Western one — punctuate with explosions, with the big dramatic markers — and mine drifted toward Wu Wei, the way of water, the idea that the flow itself is the thing and you don't have to keep poking at it. (Fittingly, the one Tao line I could quote — governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish — is the one Reagan cribbed, which I somehow knew and couldn't explain.) That pulled us into Eastern versus Western minds: the David Brooks anecdote about kids sorting a cow, a chicken, and grass — Western children pairing the two animals by category, Eastern children pairing the cow with the grass because the cow eats it. Relationship versus category. Dan added the WEIRD study where Westerners lock onto a painting's focal point while Eastern viewers take in the whole canvas, and suddenly I wanted to go back to the MFA in Houston and look at every landscape differently.

We landed where these conversations always seem to: on the inner voice. Dan recommended Ethan Kross's Chatter, about the dialogue running in your head and how much power you actually have over it, and we kicked around the old rider-and-the-elephant image — the rational rider, the emotional elephant, and the humbling fact that the rider can be completely right and the elephant still won't budge. The point isn't to win; it's to remember you are the rider, that you and your thoughts aren't the same entity. When Dan asked what each of us wanted to manifest into 2025, I said I want to make fewer brash statements and ask more questions — to actually understand the lens someone else sees the world through. Dan said quality of presence, and I made him repeat it twice because it was the best thing either of us said all hour.

There's no destination, just the practice — the endless river, and the work of being all the way there for the part of it you're in. We'll catch you next time. Bring your bidets.

— Sean