🔘 Daily Notes .1

Thoughts on design, Shiatsu, and laying on the ground

🔘 Daily Notes chronicles my unedited thoughts at the moment, from day to day. Let’s see if I can write 10 days in a row! 🍵

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If asked, I’d say I have been a designer since I was 14 or 15. I’m not sure how I got started looking at the world that way, but I’ve always appreciated beauty in one way or another.

Design to me is about capturing shape, attention, or space with the least friction. I’ve always crafted my writing, creative work, and my own way in the world with awareness of these ideas.

That’s why minimal aesthetics appeal to me. They capture shape, attention, and space without much effort, without friction.

I have been intrigued recently by a pathway forward for myself toward something I have been walking the edges of for a long time, namely, a way to practice medicine. So I am thinking of applying to a school in Chicago. I feel that in some way, this direction is collaborative with all the decisions I’ve made in the past. Not that I think Zen Shiatsu or a job in medicine will be the end of my path in terms of development and growth. It just seems like the next stepping stone. And it’s something I can relate to the aesthetics of.

It’s strange, in the end, how much what something looks like from the outside ends up meaning. Because we’re always told that beauty is only skin deep, or that “light is the perfume of form” (Cartier-Bresson). And yet there are brilliant moments, of a certain kind of light at a certain time of day, or a spark of attraction between you and a stranger, that are deeply memorable.

Some of my finest memories are like a beautiful painting or photograph, frozen in time—the feeling, the look, the scent even. Somehow, beauty and aesthetics guide us toward what feels right. And yet it’s true, they are ephemeral, fleeting, “yang.”

So when I saw that the type of medicine I may learn, called Zen Shiatsu, is offered seated, on the floor, on a thin (but comfortable) mat, I was intrigued by the aesthetics. If you imagine a healer, someone humble usually comes to mind. And what better, humbler, simpler position to approach a patient then when they are laying close to the earth, on the ground?