名 · NameA name is a guest in the life it describes.
Kumma
Kumma Wu · Los Angeles
What is it
to be aware?
I return to questions about consciousness: what experience is, how it relates to reality, and how awareness of my thoughts, emotions, and habits changes the way I live.
I write and build software, read philosophy, religion, and history, train, and trade. These pages hold things I’ve made and thoughts I’m still working through.
主 · AgencyI listen to the world and answer for my own choices.
Before I call a choice my own, I want to notice what is moving me.
Reacting — strike out the “re” to leave “acting.”
Draw a line through the “Re”.
主體 Agency: to be the subject of your own sentence, not its object.
Habit and other people’s expectations can move me before I have asked whether I agree.
I want to notice those influences, choose what I will act on, and answer for the consequences.
知 · UnderstandingSome things I understand long before I can live them.
Understanding arrives first.
The bodycatches up.
I can understand an idea and still meet the same situation with an old response.
I return to that gap through practice: noticing what I do, trying again, and letting experience revise what I thought I knew.
步 · StepsI return to familiar ground with a different way of standing.
Three steps forward, two back.
習 · PracticeI return to the work, and to what I have stopped noticing.
- 01Train.Most days. Returning to what the body learns through doing.
- 02Trade.Decisions under uncertainty, with consequences I have to accept.
- 03Build.Making tools and systems, and learning from what happens when they are used.
- 04Study.Philosophy, religion, and history. Reading sources, comparing interpretations, and writing through my own questions.
Reason tells us how to walk,
emotion reminds us why we walk.
Returning to the same work can reveal something I missed before.
律 · MeasureTo know what is enough, and when to stop.
Three reminders from my trading practice
Don’t chase.
Stay small.
Stay bored.
In trading, I use these reminders to keep risk bounded and notice when urgency begins to make the decision for me.
Their usefulness has a context. Beyond trading, I keep asking: when does a rule help me see clearly, and when do I stop looking because I have a rule?
理 · ReasonWhat am I experiencing, and what have I already decided it means?
凡所有相，皆是虛妄；若見諸相非相，則見如來。
Some passages stay with me because I don’t finish understanding them.
What am I experiencing, and what have I already decided it means? I ask this about a thought, an identity, and the reality I take for granted.
I want to read closely enough to let a text disagree with me.
道
I have to live before I have finished understanding.