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Around the time that he reached the unnerving milestone of turning thirty, Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to the ruler of Milan listing the reasons he should be given a job. He had been moderately successful as a painter in Florence, but he had trouble first his commissions and was searching for new horizons. In the first ten paragraphs, he touted his engineering skills, including his ability to design bridges, waterways, cannons, armored vehicles, and public buildings. Only in the eleventh paragraph, at the end, did he add that he was also an artist. “Likewise in painting I can do everything possible,” he wrote.

Likewise, I can do everything possible, or at least everything worth attempting with patience, rigor, and a certain reverence for form. Like Leonardo, I do not see disciplines as separate rooms but as adjoining corridors. Often times, I find philosophy in systems.

Also like Leonardo, I am drawn to the connective tissue between them, i.e. the belief that findings and understanding flourish when domains collide. To me, what unites these pursuits is coherence, or the desire to see how patterns echo across arts and how form reappears in sound, image, proof, and code. I’m also intrigued by how a single mind can move among them.

I have been alive for 8,546 days (1,220 weeks, or 23.4 orbits around the Sun); that is, by the arithmetic of the calendar, but by the stranger arithmetic of memory, and since conscious experience seems to begin around age 3.5, I have inhabited the world knowingly for roughly 7,268 days (19.9 years). So far this comes to 289 full moons, 93 seasons, and an estimated 136,736,000 spoken words which I hope were more often careful, kind, and useful than otherwise.

Set against the 300,000 years history of Homo sapiens, all this amounts to only 0.00779922%, less than a mark in the margin of the species, barely a flicker in the long human story. And yet consciousness is what gives scale its irony; for one mind, this thin fraction has already contained worlds, mornings and losses, recognitions and revisions, confessions, affections, convictions, mistakes, recoveries, extraordinary moments, although some might sound ordinary someitmes.

According to current WHO estimates, the global average life expectancy is 73.3 years, which means I have lived 31.9% of that expectation, with 2,603 weeks (18,227 days, or about 49.9 years) left. That's my uncertain allowance of time in which I have to pay better attention, to make better things, to be good, and to leave the world, where I can, a little gentler than I found it.