FIELD NOTES

A personal reflection on aesthetics, ethics, and epistemic craftsmanship

There are people who change, and there are people who calcify.

I don’t say that with judgment—at least not entirely. But I’ve come to see that some inner force compels me, quietly but persistently, to keep moving. To revisit old positions, rework familiar materials, and shape a life that feels made, not inherited.

This isn’t about novelty or restlessness. It’s about staying in contact with the ground beneath you. Ideas, preferences, identities—they don’t just spring up and remain vital. Like soil, they require tending. Without oxygen and motion, they compact. They harden. They die.

I believe in the moral necessity of reexamination.

I visited an estate sale the other day. The house, built in the mid-1970s and designed by an architect, had that rare quality of becoming a world unto itself. It wasn’t just a structure—it was an environment, a philosophy rendered in wood and glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, tabby concrete, a small prayer room tucked by the entry, and custom doors carved with a repeating motif that echoed through the trim work and furnishings. Everywhere, you felt the presence of a singular vision—intent carried across 6,000 square feet.

Growing up in Melbourne, Florida, just an hour from Disney World, I spent more time than most kids wandering through visions of the future. My grandparents would generously gift us annual passes, so we went often. And while Magic Kingdom had the spectacle, it was Epcot that really hooked me.

Even as a kid in the early ’90s, I could tell Epcot’s future was outdated. But it was a cool kind of outdated—sleek monorails, geodesic domes, fountains synchronized to synthesizer-heavy anthems. Music coming out of rocks. It didn’t look like anything else I saw in real life, and that was part of the appeal. Epcot made a bold promise: the future would be coherent, designed, joyful. A place worth arriving at.