Dailies is a column I’m experimenting with sharing daily meditations, morning pages, and sounds. If you want to only receive certain updates, feel free to edit your settings. Lots of goodies in this one! Enjoy…

✦ meditations — morning pages

On Life’s Scope

I’ve been thinking a lot about my scope of life lately: everything within a metaphorical circle of what is getting my energy and attention right now. The honest territory of what I’m working with.

For a long time, I tried to organize that territory. Map it out, optimize it, make sure every corner was accounted for. In the same vein, people endlessly reference the age-old framework of Ikigai — the tidy intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what pays. (The modern-day yuppie loves a good framework.)

Ikigai is elegant on paper. I don’t think it’s wrong, but I’ve been sitting with why it’s never worked for me… I think it it treats your life like a problem that needs a solution. Popular visualizations of it encourage you to find the precise center of the Venn diagram. It creates a false promise of “arriving.”

In reality, I find life’s seasons to be sprawling and unwieldy to be able to force fit into a neat framework most of the time. It asks you to know, in advance, the shape of something that hasn’t taken form yet. And then you spend all your energy trimming toward a design you drew before you understood the true terrain of what’s within and true to you.

Structure matters — I’m not abandoning that. But somewhere along the way I realized I wanted to start patiently noticing what was trying to grow organically. This newsletter you’re reading is one of those experiments.

Ungardened Gardens

In Korean, the original word for garden is wonrim (원림, from the Chinese 園林). It translates to “forest-garden,” but within Korean culture it’s come to mean something more specific: the philosophy of elevating nature without the touch of the human hand.

If you’ve ever visited a botanical garden, you’ve likely experienced a Chinese or Japanese one. Korean gardens are far less common outside Korea — and there’s a reason. A Chinese garden recreates the essence of nature within a walled retreat: rockeries, moon gates, painterly scenes you can recreate. A Japanese garden abstracts nature into extremely precise, symbolic arrangements. But a Korean garden relies on the actual landscape: the specific mountains, the existing streams, the terrain already there. They aren’t as portable since it’s difficult to export what relies on the native landscape of a place.

Overly designing a space goes directly against the Korean tradition (ironic given how over manicured Korean cultural exports and modernism have become). The approach treats nature as a benevolent partner rather than a chaotic force to be tamed. Rooted in geologic stability and Neo-Confucian humility, ancient Korean landscapers sought to inhabit nature as gently as possible. They placed a simple pavilion in an existing forest, letting the land stay as it is. The technique of chagyeong (차경), or “borrowed scenery,” seamlessly integrates distant peaks into the garden’s composition. The gardener’s job is to not impose a vision as much as possible. They aim to think of themselves as a guest of the mountain — emptying the space of human ego so the existing landscape can speak for itself.

There’s a 500-year-old garden called Soswaewon (소쇄원), built by a scholar named Yang San-bo. Its design is chagyeong in practice: pulling the surrounding scenery in rather than building walls against it. Its walls were constructed with deliberate openings so a natural mountain stream could flow through the grounds uninterrupted. The concept behind Soswaewon — anbinnakdo (안빈낙도) — is all about finding comfort in simplicity, taking pleasure in an honest life.

Korean gardens aren’t seen as aesthetically grand. But I think there’s a deep poeticism in letting nature stay ungardened…

You can probably see where I’m taking this point. (:

The ungardened garden is closer to how I’ve started to view the scope of my life. Following instinct. Letting curiosity lead instead of a rigid framework. Not forcing a shape onto things, but paying attention to what emerges when I stop over-designing.

A Living Scope

There’s a word from ecology that’s been making the rounds again: rewilding. Removing the interference and letting a landscape return to what it naturally wants to be. Not neglect, but recognition.

I’ve been rewilding my life! Again, structure is still there and matters, but it arrives on its own terms now. I follow what feels alive. I hold myself back from hedging things before they’ve even had a chance to take form.

Viewing life with a lens of “scope” is useful and effective. There are only so many hours, so much energy, so much attention. But within that scope, let’s not forget that everything is living. Growing. Shifting. If your scope were a circle, the question isn’t how to optimize the blobs inside it. It’s whether you’re willing to let the landscape breathe — to trust that what grows, might be closer to what you actually need than anything you could have pre-designed.

What would grow back if you let it? 🌱

(Note: These reflections and meditations are simply how I like to begin my day — an invitation to build a little internal momentum, not a mandate to feel good at all costs. They are not an attempt to bypass grief, uncertainty, or the very real darkness of the world. But this practice exists alongside that awareness, not in denial of it. My hope in sharing this is to transfer some of this good energy.)

✦ sounds (n.) — this mornings playlist

To dive right into focus mode, listen to this upbeat set in nature: My YouTube algorithm is nearly half all DJ sets now. I aim to look for ones where a real person is obviously behind it. So many AI videos now that trick us! Enjoy:

To feel like you’re at a house party, here’s something from Australia: Maybe it’s because Aussies are on an island, but there’s a lot of cool pockets of culture that I see displayed online. This one especially had me smiling:

✦ spaces — places visited and liked

Cooper Hewitt & NYC: I crashed at a friends house in Brooklyn (near my old neighborhood) for a few days. The first place I went was the Cooper Hewitt Museum to experience the Ojas room. It was a nice way to start my stay. This time, I was in NY purely for pleasure and it made a big difference. Staying at hotels and going to workshops is great, but it felt like my old home again this time. Saw lots of friends and galleries. I should do it more often.

Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream: I visited a peculiar place near the White House. As they describe it, it is an “interactive experience dedicated to the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to pursue a life of meaning and fulfillment.” In reality, I found it to be like a colorful Severance set doubling as a manicured pro-capitalism shrine as it was founded by Michael Milken. To be honest, it all felt a bit North Korean charade-y… focused on an ideal that feels far away for most of the population today. (It was free and no money or information was contributed on my end.) One thing that did stand out to me was how data was embedded into the space itself. Something I hadn’t seen before.

✦ field notes: things digested, created

• Re-introducing Studio Emerline: I updated my Substack about and have begun to formalize some of the columns here. Take a look! :)

• I’m editing a vlog from my trip to Sedona for an architecture immersion program. Hoping to finish it this week. 🏜️ Here’s the first few seconds of it as a preview:

✦ nice finds

Loved this piece by Van Newman (my old colleague and all-around talented artist): Day & Night: The Emerging Aesthetics of New Wave Neo-Ludditism.

“This is simply what design (and culture, for that matter) does: it swings one way and swings back in the other direction. I think what’s exciting about this moment is that there are clearly enough touch points that we can place on a wide enough spectrum that it has two ends to swing from. Each end still leads to a more intentional, less online life.”

✦ meditations — morning pages

Creating Wiggle

Maybe you know this feeling: Life moves forward, days pass, work gets done. But underneath, something feels stuck. The outside keeps changing while the inside stays fixed in place. You can be years into a myriad of journeys, crossing items off lists, and still feel like you’re running in place.

The instinct is to do more. Add another project, another commitment, another plan. But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe movement in this moment requires subtraction first.

I’ve been caught between the axes of hard choices lately. So naturally, I’ve been doing some reading, and there’s a treasure trove of wisdom to be found when you learn about how hard choices actually work. One I’ve found quite helpful is from philosopher Ruth Chang. Her work suggests that our hardest choices are often not the kinds between good and bad, but the kinds of choices where there’s no clear “right” answer because the options aren’t even comparable. Ways of living, career paths, creative projects. The decisions that paralyze aren’t about discovering the correct choice. According to Chang, they’re about creating who you become through the choosing. As life’s responsibilities seem to pile up, it’s easy to forget this simple and empowering perspective.

But it’s hard to do anything (especially make life altering, hard choices) when you’re carrying too much in the first place. The expectations, the stories we tell ourselves about what should happen, the weight of maintaining momentum for its own sake — all of it fills and counts in life’s bag. You can’t pivot when you’re locked in place by the sheer weight of maintaining more than you’d like to carry.

So what if we tried developing intentional looseness? Let’s call it wiggle physics. In actual physics, oscillation requires two things: displacement from equilibrium (doing something new or different that changes your status quo) and momentum (building on that initial energy) to keep moving. You can’t oscillate from a fixed position.

The same applies to our artfully inclined, creative lives. Creating wiggle means:

First, displace yourself from equilibrium:

• Move your body every day. Get your blood pumping, shift your physical state.

• Try something genuinely new, an experience that isn’t the mundane, your everyday.

• Do something you know creates undeniable energy in you: hike that trail, host that gathering, play that instrument.

Then, use the momentum with your life battery charged:

• Journal, voice record, talk through the thing you’ve been avoiding.

• Carve out focused time each morning to take one small step on what matters.

• Let the movement create more movement.

In physics, damping forces (friction, resistance) eventually slow oscillation down. The extra baggage we’re carrying ruins the wiggle! The lighter your load, the longer you can keep moving, the more range you have to explore different positions before settling.

Infusing wiggle into your life means creating the conditions where intentional looseness is inevitable (or as the male thought leader types like to call it, thrashing). The act creates enough space between who you were and who you might become to actually make a choice about the difference.

So go ahead. Let’s get wiggling. 🐛

✦ sounds (n.) — this mornings playlist

To stimulate the mind, listen to this Ethio Jazz set: Washington, D.C., has the largest Ethiopian population outside of the motherland itself. So, I have been eating and listening to all things Ethiopian lately.

To be in a good mood, listen to this vinyl set: I love “traveling the world corners” via DJ sets. One of my favorite channels from Vietnam is hosted by the sound collective Quện:

✦ spaces — places visited and liked

Jogging the Tidal Basin: Considering the state of affairs, I have been trying to not take D.C.’s existing monuments and architecture for granted. Whenever I’m running the Tidal Basin, I feel a sense of calm and peace that is unique to this place. Different from California or New York’s scenes, there’s a level of stoic peace that is hard to describe.

More Smithsonian moments: One of my favorite spots on the Mall is the Enid A. Haupt Garden. It’s an elegant garden and courtyard that sits behind the Smithsonian Castle. It was raining over the weekend, so my partner and I stuck to the indoors. We checked out the new Moongate cafe in the Asian Art Museum and the Filipino exhibit in the American History Museum.

✦ field notes: things digested, created

Nostalgia of Home Videos

My mom, Umma, turned 60 this week. My mom and I are very different people, but we have a close relationship and friendship. In Korean culture, the 60s, 70s, and so on are big deals. Back when most people died early, making it to 60 years old was a big deal. You’d typically have a 잔치 (jan • chi) feast to celebrate.

But 60 does feel like the new 50 in some ways. While I see my parents are certainly aging, they still are very young in spirit and have lifestyles that my grandparents didn’t dream of at their age.

Being far from my folks means that I have to get creative sometimes with the birthday gifts. There’s only so many material objects, cards, and packaged deliveries that can show how much I love them. So yesterday, I took a deep breath and began to work on something my mom has been asking for for a very long time: sharing old family trip videos.

I’m very lucky in that I grew up traveling a lot with my family. I can’t believe it, but the last time the four of us took an international trip together was back in 2015. Below is a rough cut video I sent my mom for her birthday (she loved it and demands more). I was just out of college in this video, haha:

I really love the roughness and surprises from VHS home video tapes. They have no intentional sequence to them. They are just chronological moments recorded because someone thought they were worth capturing. Then, when you reached the end of the tape, you’d simply bring it to the shop and they’d give you a physical tape. Voila.

Our phones and social media make “home video VHS” mementos feel like a thing of the past. Family moments feel ephemeral or lost deep in some cloud folder. It’s a lot of of mental and creative labor to “organize” these digital files, but I hope to find ways to make this an easier process.

✦ nice finds

Speaking of getting unstuck, here is the most dangerous writing app:

I use this app almost every other day. Whenever I want to power through feelings of resistance and just start to get words on screen, I go to Squibler’s site and use this tool (I hope they never get rid of it!).

You set the length of time you want to write. Then, when it starts, the only thing you need to keep doing is to… keep typing. The moment you stop typing, even if the words or sequence of letters are gibberish, the text disappears. It only starts saving it once you hit the time length. I usually just set it for 5 minutes and will keep going when the timer runs outs.

(P.S. “Dailies” is a column I’m experimenting with here on Substack. Meant to share my morning pages, field notes, and what caught my attention this week. If you want to only receive larger updates, feel free to edit your settings.)

✦ meditations — morning pages

Stop at nothing*

You have a vision. It may feel hazy at times, but it’s there, calling to you with persistence.

The path to that vision requires growth, and growth often arrives wrapped in discomfort. Yet within that discomfort lives something vital: the signal that you’re moving toward what matters most.

Some habits that once served you well may no longer fit who you’re becoming. This is not failure. This is evolution asking you to shed what no longer belongs. The monitoring of others and the trap of comparison will steal your energy if you let it. Comparison measures you against someone else’s journey, when the only meaningful measure is your own forward motion.

Protect your time, attention, and energy fiercely. These are not renewable resources you can afford to waste on thoughts that diminish rather than build.

You may find yourself searching for answers outside yourself… in others’ success, in external validation, in the paths that seem easier. But the answers you seek are already within you, waiting for your courage to face them honestly.

Self-doubt will whisper that the journey will be long and hard. Let another voice respond: What if it didn’t take long at all? What if it was easier than you think?

You’ve stepped through portals before. You’ve moved from one reality to another. You know transformation is possible because you’ve already lived it.

The vision you hold is uniquely yours. External success may help propel it forward, but what you truly want is simpler and clearer than you realize.

Stop at nothing to complete your good, authored work. Not because the path will be easy, but because you’ve already decided the destination is worth it.

(*I saw Marty Supreme over the weekend. Don’t be like Marty.)

✦ sounds (n.) — this mornings playlist

✦ spaces — places visited and liked

Retro diner: I have a soft spot for old school diners. I didn’t grow up going to American diners all that much (Korean breakfasts ftw), but occasionally I have a craving for it. Yesterday, my partner and I went to Metro 29 in Northern Virginia. I loved the retro look to it and everything about it was perfect.

Skylight portal: There’s a cafe I go to occasionally called Pluma. I like to stare at the beautiful portal on the ceiling in between thinking and working. There’s something about it that gives such solace, especially since it’s been very cold in D.C.

✦ field notes — latest digested

The Mastermind (on Mubi): I checked out Mubi recently and really enjoyed the movie The Mastermind starring Josh O’Connor. I loved every minute of it. It’s essentially a dry humor, quiet heist plot gone wrong. I’m not familiar with Kelly Reichardt’s work, but I was so glad to have been introduced this particular film via a brilliant partnership the MAJ channel had (below).

The Mastermind fits into the bucket of minimal films I enjoy such as Columbus, Losing Ground, and the more widely known Before trilogy. I’m not someone who collects a lot of items materially, but I did like going down the rabbit hole of all the shoppable consumer goods such as MUBI Editions, Notebook Magazine, and the similar A24 shop.

✦ nice finds — dc historic

One delightful find was a site and app called DC Historic (part of the city’s preservation efforts). Their app is surprisingly good and walking around the city become a fun educational experience. You can select “tour playlists” and essentially go on a curated walk on your own while learning about the significance of neighborhoods, buildings, and the histories of them.

Washington, D.C. as a city has a lot of issues, but they also do a lot of things right. Compared to the rest of the dire state of this country’s infrastructure and urban planning, D.C.’s walkability and access to cultural resources continues to surprise me. (For example, I learned recently I have access to dozens of free indoor pools just by being a resident.)

(P.S. World headlines continue to create a whirlwind of emotions about how the leaders of the world are moving. But, I hope you’ll be able to find solace and focus during this first month of 2026. Hope you have a great week.)