Seeker

A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.

I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.

I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe a whole person. It is a strange way to think of yourself. I came up with many descriptors, but they are not the whole thing. I knew that already. Still, I wondered why they were the fragments that I chose to put down on paper.

When I offered my fragments to Claude, it pointed out that the underlying theme to them all, the one that ties it all together, makes me a “seeker.” And almost instantly I realized that’s the word that describes me best, more than anything else.

I have always believed that you need others to see you better than you see yourself. Just as I am able to see, learn, and appreciate others better. In this specific case, Claude found an underlying correlation.

Over the years I have amassed many fragments of self. The phrases I ended up using to describe myself.

Curious. Interesting. Sarcastic. Optimistic. Cool. Forever young. Worry wart. Uptight. Indecisive waffler. Taste maker. Curator. Never finish. Early adopter. Careless.

Curator and Taste are real. But they are outputs. Descriptive of what I produce. Seeker is the reason I am. The AI pointed out that most seekers are better at outward motion than the inward one. Or maybe the AI was just doing what it is trained to do: be a sycophant, aimed to please, saying what you think you need to hear.

But, I do trust my own view of things. And of me. More than AI, or more than any other person. I just lack the vocabulary to describe myself for myself. Words are very important, but when it comes to the self and labeling myself, they have failed me.

Because words are your salvation, your reason to be, as a writer you feel your verbal shortcomings more acutely.

---

“We know more than we can tell.”

Michael Polanyi.

And while Polanyi was writing about science, it applies here too. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, points out that articulation isn’t just description. It changes how you see what you know. The gap between awareness and articulation is something we don’t think about enough.

But we should.

As I came closer to my own fragments, I realized that the glue that holds them together is a fundamental quality I don’t even think about. Caring.

Curiosity means I care enough to dig deeper. My sarcasm is a mask for caring enough to be disappointed. I worry because I care too much to let go. An indecisive waffler? Maybe I don’t want to get it wrong. You get the point. The fragments point to just one thing. And I didn’t even realize it. It took a long few days of introspection to even come to this realization.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, had it right: language chops up something that was never meant to be fragmented. I suppose that’s where it all started. Where my fragments of self managed to hide the one word that describes it all.

Maybe because you are too close to yourself. Too clouded to see clearly. And that’s why you have to go outside to get a better perspective. Or maybe that’s the journalist in me. A larger perspective, a bigger context, a lens that’s not so close.

Weirdly, this translates in my photography as well. I find beauty in a landscape through its contours and its outlines, not in its details. And even when I get close, I always seek the essential.

So maybe “Seeker” is the best descriptor. What fuels the seeking is that you care. I care about a lot of things. Not sure why. But I do. Maybe I will never know. Maybe that’s the point.

Ancient philosophers across all traditions, Western, Zen, or Vedic, point out that seeking is noble. But the seeker has to make peace with the idea of never arriving.

I think I am okay with that.

March 28, 2026. San Francisco