What I Was Born For

Birthday Thoughts

Although today is my sixtieth birthday, I can’t say I’m feeling exceptionally reflective, likely because I’m always thinking about my life anyway (without, I hope, overthinking it). That said, during the process of self-discovery I’ve been engaged in over the last few months, I’ve come to realize that there are three things I was born for back on August 6th, 1966: making music, seeking wisdom, and giving love. By way of contrast, it’s true that I had a successful career as a technologist, but I never felt that I was born for that work despite the fact that I excelled at it, had some significant accomplishments, earned enough money to retire at age fifty-five, and collaborated with so many wonderful people.

When I was twelve or thirteen years old (exact dates are hazy), I had three experiences that fundamentally formed who I am: I started playing guitar, I read The Fountainhead, and I fell in love for the first time. In characteristic fashion, I went deep on all three and I’m well aware that I lost my head in several respects because I’m such a passionate person. (As one example, I went intellectually overboard by mainlining Ayn Rand during my teenage years, and it wasn’t until I wrote The Tao of Roark around thirty years later that I finished working through all that; yet despite the many twists and turns I’ve taken since then, it was my encounter with Rand that set me on a course of seeking wisdom and striving to live in truth - what Pierre Hadot calls philosophy as a way of life - and for that reason I’ve always been grateful to Rand for her provocative writings.)

At the time I had no idea how to process, let alone express, the powerful emotions I felt - indeed, even now that can still be a challenge for me! As early as age four or five I had the sense that my emotional experiences were abnormally intense. Once I got to elementary school, I quickly realized that for the sake of self-preservation I needed to hide those feelings or I would end up being crushed. In my teenage years - a roiling cauldron of emotions for just about everyone - I went through a rationalistic phase in which I stopped playing or listening to music because my mind told me it was irrational even though my heart knew that, as Nietzsche said, life without music would be a mistake. Et cetera.

In addition to numerous recent commitments of giving love to family members, one reason I haven’t posted much lately is that I’ve been more focused on making music than on seeking wisdom (though if you ask me the two are intertwined because I happen to think that the arts are an alternative path to wisdom). In particular, my dear friend and musical partner Manuel Nunez has moved back to Colorado and we’ve been busy settling on repertoire, arranging songs, and developing our real-time rapport for purposes of performance and recording. As a result, my normal regimen of reading, writing, and translating has taken something of a back seat. I suppose it’ll all balance out eventually, but in the meantime I might be rather quiet here.

Sunset, 2026-08-02, by Peter Saint-Andre