Uncharted territory



Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul. —Vasily Kandinsky, The Effect of Color, 1911



I've been thinking about institutions that exist, and how and if I want to place myself in their contexts.



Let me explain. What I am drawn to — what I, in my purest form, have always been drawn to — is the world without structures and boundaries. When given an endless canvas or a boundless field, I run wild and feel free.



It is a twist of irony, then, that I have found myself talented at endeavours with structure and precedence. The rigour of academia, the normality of a linear career path, the pressures of familial expectation, the technical mastery of piano — all of these represent shackles that I want to escape.



What I abhor with every fibre of my being is the notion that "This is the way things are, this is the way things will always be." It is a message I received too frequently in childhood and adolescence, a message that permeated my unconscious in ways that I still fight today.



The idea that anything is possible and there are no limits is what drew me towards the technology industry. Now that I am fully immersed in it, I see the forms and structures of this industry as well, and it has lost a lot of its lustre.



I acknowledge that there is a middle ground between riding on the shoulders of giants past and charting new territory. This is the space I want to play in: at the edge of known territory and the vast expanse of the unknown.



Importantly, I do not want to sit in the midst of the known anymore.



(I was inspired along this line of thought after watching the Dominique Crenn episode of Chef's Table. In it, Dominique remarks that the moment she arrived in San Francisco in the nineties, she felt like she was home. "I was allowed to be myself, and San Francisco was this place where there was no judgment." I don't believe this to be true about my experience of San Francisco presently, and I don't think it has anything to do with the city itself, but rather my subjective experience of it. Which means it can change quite quickly.)