Life is a series of experiments

it ebbs and flows and comes and goes

Lands End — March 2024

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on what has felt like a monumental trip with my family in China. It had been nearly a decade since I’d been back.

In that time, I’d discovered that I had spent most of my life suppressing my identity as a Chinese American woman, catalyzed by my move to the Bay Area and the explosion of anti-Asian hate. It was amidst the rage that “I can resent my culture, but fuck you for attacking my people and our culture” that I confronted years of shame around being Chinese and began repairing my relationship with my heritage.

Always a guest, I’d felt a distance between me, my relatives, and the land on prior trips — as if I was just an American visiting China, not a descendant returning to the place she came from. This time, it felt different. I felt home.

Before we left, I had intended to queue up a few essays to publish while I was traveling, but in the shuffle of gearing up for the trip and giving myself space to emotionally prepare for the journey, I surrendered to the reality that I had no fully formed thoughts that were ready to be released into the world.

This piece is a lens into how I’m learning to soften into the flow of life, shedding my armor of rigidity, and giving myself the permission to just be.

Thank you for giving me the space to step away for a few weeks and fully live the stories that I’ll be sharing over the next few months. I’m back and I have so much to tell you.

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Several weeks ago, I celebrated another revolution around the sun. As I meditated on the last 365 days, I was struck by how much has changed in the span of one year.

For most of my life, I’d been walking the same path and now, slowly and then all at once, I had stumbled off the well-worn path and found myself traversing an entirely new terrain. Instead of clenching to the map that I’d always relied on as my guide, I’d traded it for a compass.

I used to scoff at the cliché sentiment of orienting life around the journey rather than the destination. I identified so much as a destination-oriented person that this notion seemed irrelevant to me, perhaps meant for people who weren’t very ambitious. I was so focused on mapping my life around driving results and arriving at milestones that it never occurred to me that I could let up on the gas every so often and tune into what was unfolding around me.

Slowing down to speed up takes courage — it was only when I mustered enough fortitude to live more bravely in the last year that an important lesson, life is just a series of experiments, found its way to my consciousness.

The insight first came to me in August on a 10-day meditation retreat. I was two days into the retreat and wrestling with the boredom that comes with being without a journal, books, and technology in the middle of the woods. My days revolved around meditating, walking, eating, and sleeping.

After some initial panic around the decision I’d made to go off the grid for 10 days (and admittedly, some minor withdrawal), I began to notice how freeing it felt to reduce my life down to four things and temporarily rid myself of all the decisions I’m inundated with every day.

When the external outputs and infinite optionality fell away, I grappled with the reality that the freedom we seek through accumulation is actually found on the other side of simplicity. In our attempts to fill our days with variety, we inadvertently paralyze ourselves with indecision and dilute the experiences that matter most to us. We mistakenly worship freedom of choice when it’s abundance in time to live our lives to our fullest potential that we’re seeking.

It was only when I found myself battling bouts of boredom for days on end (a feeling I’m rarely blessed with as a result of living in the city) that important truths began to emerge from within me — revelations about my purpose, my relationships, my regrets.

the perfect decision does not exist

When I think back to most of the resistance I’ve struggled against, it’s centered around feeling a stuckness and a lack of momentum, marked by a hesitancy to take a leap for fear of making the “wrong” decision.

I often know what I want to do, but feel apprehensive opening the door, not knowing what’s on the other side.

In these moments, I wish I could have told myself:

This is just an experiment. It’s only by walking through the portal that you’ll gain more clarity.

Recognizing the reality that few decisions we make are irreversible — inconvenient, but rarely undoable — would have mobilized me to swiftly and gracefully open more doors.

What I hadn’t appreciated as I was trying to figure out the perfect moment to turn the knob was that “figuring it out” happens in building the courage to turn the knob.

The sooner we frame decisions as experiments to be studied and learned from, the sooner we can give ourselves the permission to experiment and the more wisdom we have to draw from to make our next set of decisions.

This mentality flips the notion that there’s a “perfect moment” on its head. The perfect moment is now and it’s in pursuit of moving towards more alignment as each experiment brings about new insight into what works and what doesn't.

When we release ourselves from the pressure to have it all figured out, we learn to figure it out along the way.

detaching from our attachments

In every era of life, we’re shedding old identities and stepping into new ones. As we pursue our ambitions in hopes of filling our lives with meaning, we attach ourselves to outcomes as if our lives depended on it.

What if we looked at each experience as just a part of a larger experiment?

What if we gently let go of the notion that we must control every outcome and instead turn our attention to grokking the lessons that life hands us at every turn?

Rather than brute forcing our way to making it all happen just as we envisioned, releasing ourselves from the precise outcomes inevitably opens us to far more opportunities than we can imagine, not less.

At every decision point, we only have a percentage of the information we need to make the call. Taking a step forward towards a decision without attaching to the destination is what helps us acquire the clarity we’re seeking — and perhaps makes space for a new waypoint to unexpectedly materialize.

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is exploring what’s next after an intense few years working in tech. She asked me if it felt freeing knowing that I wouldn’t go back to a full-time job.

I replied, “It’s hard to say. I’m unattached to a full-time job either way.”

My response surprised her.

After a year of experimenting with living, working, and being in more ways than I can count, I’ve come around on the idea that it’s not worth putting finality into most decisions. I’m committed to seeing my vision of redefining human flourishing in the 21st century through and helping others become more themselves — in whatever forms that present themselves and however they take shape.

The important thing to me is building towards a world where we all feel empowered to take responsibility for our own flourishing and contribute to human progress through our genuine self-expression. The path that leads me there is secondary.

There are forces far beyond our control that play meaningful roles in how our lives unfold. I’m reminded of our mortality and the impermanence of it all every time I visit the ocean. With each wave that hits the shore, it’s as if the water roars: life is just one looooong series of experiments.

Thanks for reading! What experiments are you running in your life?

Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter — I’d love to hear from you :)

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

Year of doing the damn thing

A lifetime of should-ing

6 months of surrendering to the unknown

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.