On Finding is the self-inventory entry in the ongoing On __ᵢng series of lyric–philosophical essays. Opening on the everyday absurdity that we cannot reliably find even our own keys, it turns the question of how a person finds purpose inward, cataloguing the books, music, art, and ideas that shaped the author across a lifetime. Read through the series' "quantum lens, " these formative encounters are treated as superpositions collapsed into meaning by memory and attention — the legible traces, or "Jays, " that a person aligned with the present moment leaves through time. Before handing the search back to the reader, the essay names its ethic plainly: that ego and the felt sense of superiority break a person's coherence, and that kindness, the suppression of the Schadenfreude impulse, and turning one's attention back outward are how alignment — and the world — heals. It is offered not as a doctrine to receive but as an invitation to look in unfamiliar places and remain open, sustaining the series' commitment to lyric register over academic formality and to transparency about where claim ends and feeling begins.
Jamison Johsnon (Fri,) studied this question.