Did you catch yourself changing?
Variant of a pep talk.
There is a particular pleasure in catching something in the act.
Mostly because then you can pinpoint the moment and save it, in both senses of the word. Before fruit passes its ripening into decay, the hint of brown on the edge of a petal to tell you it’s time to bring it back to life again. It was one way and now on its way to another. But most change happens below the threshold of detection, already perfect or already dead; the person you don’t fully recognize standing slightly ahead of you, until you look back and call the self you are now a ghost you once knew.
I try to catch myself in the process, looking for signals that change is happening in the correct and desired direction. One way to almost-guarantee this is surrounding myself with systems and people and environments designed to keep me moving. Or build habits that force novelty as an adjacent signal, such as actively trying to listen to new music. A study by The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company, made the internet rounds back in 2015 showing that music taste remains relatively stagnant after the age of 331. So, the music you love at 33 is the music you love at 43, and so on. Everything else after sounds like “I’m too old for this” music. Their research2 also found that there is a roughly 35% overlap between preferred artists for 65 year olds vs 13 year olds; in 2014, 12 years ago, that list prominently featured Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars as top artists in both groups. Another study by Cambridge University came out more recently showing that our brains don’t stop developing at 25 like previously thought, but later, at around the age of 32. Separate studies, but I think they are circling the same thing: how/when/why we do or don’t change.
Good music is still good music and when it’s able to break out of a generation, people can be open to it. But for the most part we resist, reminiscing about the good old days and looking over the horizon at a further and further youth, a word that’s less about physical age and more about carrying a demeanour and openness to novelty.
I stopped seeing taste as definite and more malleable and discovered the small but noticeable pleasure of listening to new music and even new genres, welcoming an endless feed of new sounds in my ear. I have surprised myself with the music I like and don’t. I never listened to heavy metal until my mid-30s. There is a particular artist I thought was so “lame” fifteen years ago because their target demographic was, I think, actual children; I had one of their songs on repeat all April.
Sometimes awareness itself has the (smooth) texture of a life hack, something easy once known. But other kinds of change require much more effort.
So I became militant about measuring progress. Spreadsheet at first then Notion database, colour-coded and cross-referenced. If you look long enough and hard enough and measure enough of it, any change you desire can and will happen on schedule. I heeded the gospel where tech and self-help meet: what gets measured gets done. I put the fast-moving world of tech on a pedestal.
One day “efficient” became the most apt description for me, an accumulation of this underlying current of being afraid of stagnancy, habits and versions of me that weren’t me and then were. I didn’t wake up that day with a switch turned on. It was slow and mostly passive, like watching the second hand on a clock move. Except you’re not watching it.
If I could do it measurably faster, or better yet, two things at once, I would. I listened to podcasts at 1.25x speed, 1.5x if I was super focused, thinking I was hacking time until I saw others at 2x, and realized I was behind.
When I was a kid, meals were quiet (no talking, no tv), at least in their ideal state. My partner has a habit that I’ve now picked up: no eating without television. On a trip with my brother and his family, two tablets set out at every meal with the sound cranked up because they couldn’t hear over each other. Now I’ve had “time” to watch all kinds of tv—Parks and Recreation, Paw Patrol—because I am a one-bite-at-a-time slow eater.
Why just eat when you can be entertained? Single-task for work, multi-task for life. A custom approach for the task at hand.
But now I can’t go on a walk or clean until I have a podcast or playlist chosen. This week I have been listening to nu disco while drawing interspersed with old clips from the TLC show Extreme Couponing. Next week I’m sure I will have a new genre to listen to, a new guilty pleasure of the week. I am never without some kind of pleasure close by, the air of the day and nights dense and filled at a steady, clockwork pace. You can’t hear tick, tick, tick because there is always something in your ear.
I am not placing moral judgment on myself. We change in all kinds of ways, for better or worse, to adapt to how the world around us changes. Despite headlines and continued outcries of dystopia!, I do not think I am worse than I was before (in moderation). I just am.
But, I have noticed that despite the many ways I have changed without much thought given it at all, whatever moment I am in, I always feel like “things are not changing at all”.
Do you ever feel like that? The irony of living in a world where change is thrown at you at an all-time high, where you yourself are constantly moving if not in body then in mind, but you yourself as a whole feel like you are at a standstill. A boat in a raging sea, anchored to the bottom of the ocean floor.
Why does it always feel like the change I want is happening too slow for me to appreciate, too slow for me to grasp and see and witness in real time, despite my adherence to systems, plans, ways of measuring progress?
A few years ago, I came across still life photographer Adam Goodison’s vacuum-sealed flower photographs. Around the same time, I was obsessed with another image set: photographs of outer space pulled from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day archives. To me they felt like they belonged in the same conceptual universe: galaxies as blooming clusters of stardust and light, flowers as preserved artifacts drifting through an infinite unknowable universe. In 2022, I wrote a collection of poems, each one inspired by a different image, the collective whole imagined as an artifact itself. After I published the collection, it detached from me the same way I imagined the flowers would float away and disappear, an act of preservation we eventually have to let go of. And I moved on.
Three years later, I came back to this image and concept through research instead of poetry. One subject led to another: astrophysics, quantum physics, biology, art history, technology. I wanted to understand a little better the context of my universe. Eventually they began folding into each other, all circling the same underlying questions about time, change, and perspective. That path led me back to another image which has now become somewhat of an anchor for me: the Pale Blue Dot taken in 1990.
This image is our generation’s version of Copernicus’ revelation in the 16th century, that we are not the centre of the universe. Two points in the timeline that rearranged the scale of our lives. We have more than the ability to walk in someone else's shoes; we now have the capacity to go far up and out, to understand what we are really looking at.
It was my birthday this week. I am supposed to have a new list of goals for this year, to add onto the list I started at the beginning of the year. I am supposed to have looked back at my previous year and been able to neatly say “I did this”. I don’t have much to say this year. In many senses of the term, I have not done much. (Not entirely true; I do consider going to China a bit of a creative pivot point for me.) I certainly have not changed my life, at least not in any sense that I can perceive right now. But I have done many tiny wonderful things.
One thing I have done is I have not given up. Because the challenge I am always confronted with is not changing perspective in my mind, but remaining inside it long enough for the body to catch up. The body doesn’t want to get left behind. The mind says time is not real and the body laughs in its face: what about a bigger home, more cats, retirement, inflation, AI, gas prices? I do not know how to relay “everything that will happen has already happened” (the block universe theory) or “only this moment exists” (presentism) to my body. I only know this because it keeps happening: the untrained body wants to intervene in the act of change, whispering I want you to stay right there, nothing is working, why do you even try. I had traded the slow and steady act of real progress for the promise and illusion of progress and quick wins my entire life up until last year. And then fell right back into the trap by giving myself a year to make a major change, inspired by all the neatly packaged “I changed my life in a year” hooks constantly peppering my algorithm, making me feel simultaneously empowered and then deeply inept when the year passed and I was “nowhere”.
So I changed my baseline for how I measure change. I don’t remember what prompted it, but let’s theorize it’s because my mind was becoming more malleable; a combination of new music, stretched thinking courtesy of feeding my brain good poetry and interesting nonfiction, and the mental gymnastics involved in conversing with toddlers. I let go of a year as benchmark. Well, I had to; the year had passed already. But I stopped treating it like a mark I missed.
Because what has happened in my past three year spans? Truthfully a lot. So much. And what has happened in previous one year spans? Mostly “nothing”. Yet somehow, three years of “nothing” always ends up somewhere. Does the math add up? Not exactly. But life? It’s not exactly math. Try it yourself.
Last week, I returned to my website after leaving it unfinished for months, placeholders still sitting where decisions had not been made. I had to look back at the work to decide whether to include it at all. When I did, I surprised myself.
It had been in my periphery this entire time, and yet somehow what had felt unresolved while I was inside it now appeared whole and coherent, work caught in the act of becoming but ready and alive. Nothing had changed in the work itself. Only the distance to it had shifted.
I keep buying plumcots from the grocery store because the first time I had them, they were perfectly ripe and sweet. But the batch I have now has been sitting there for weeks and is still hard to the touch. It’s been weeks, maybe they’re just hard. So we cut them and taste them and they are clearly not ready. Next to them, a bowl of avocados that have ripened too quickly, and here we are, eating two at a time to save them before we have to toss them into the compost.
The only “secret” to catching any change in the act is how far back you look.
No reckoning allowed
save the marvelous arithmetics
of distance
—Excerpted from Smelling the Wind by Audre Lord, “The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance”
RECENTLY
I finally finished consolidating my 2025 body of work onto my website. If you want to take a look and read more about it, check out Gradient World.
Now, onto what I’ve been gnawing on, looking at, noticing, etc.
I don't think I will ever go back to designing clothes, but the distance from it affords me the mental space to think and enjoy without consequence. I’ve been thinking about something that this video by hanfugirl.sg on TikTok articulated well, and it’s related to why the Met Gala’s “Fashion is art” theme this year was interpreted quite literally as fashion garments inspired by “art” meaning mostly paintings and a few sculptures. What do we all think art is? I have been thinking about that question for a while now. Also recommend this video on Chanel model Bhavitha Mandava‘s “denim” Met Gala look, again circling the question of why we consider spectacle/form as central to art (translating into silhouette for fashion), when there are so many other dimensions to consider?
Speaking of art and space images, can a Youtube video be art? Water World is a Youtube video, among others created by Seán Doran based off data extrapolated from a weather satellite.
Taiwan Travelogue just won the International Booker Prize, and is the first book ever originally written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prize. My mom is born in Taiwan, and it’s where my parents met before immigrating to Canada. I am very excited to a) read this book and b) go back to Taiwan again with fresh eyes and a greater appetite.
Flowers are in full bloom right now and this year I have been paying particular attention to the petals that have started to fall on the ground, sprinkling green and concrete with brilliant purples and pinks.
A fun website: Train Jazz.
It’s been the month of nostalgic sequels: The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mortal Kombat 2. Enjoyed both, the latter perhaps slightly more. Heard good things about and want to watch: Obsession.
If you like chocolate and art supplies, you might like these.
https://skynetandebert.com/2015/04/22/music-was-better-back-then-when-do-we-stop-keeping-up-with-popular-music/comment-page-2/
https://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/13/age-specific-listening/
Love the poem you wrote! I kinda want to hang it on my wall.