Circling the Center: A Life in Systems, Signals, and Emergence

I didn’t set out to build a theory. I followed a gravity I couldn’t name, through trades, entrepreneurship, systems, and foundations, until the pattern spoke back.

The Unnamed Gravity

I did not begin with a theory. I began with wires.

There were nights when I stood in freezing mechanical rooms, tracing circuits by hand, listening for the one connection that had broken the flow. The hum of transformers in the distance, the faint click of relays, the silence of a circuit gone dead. When I found the fault, it was rarely dramatic. More often it was a single loose connection or a corroded joint, something small enough to hide until you paid real attention. Restoring coherence was never about force. It was about listening until the system revealed what it already knew.

That habit of listening began earlier, long before I carried a tool bag. My father was an instrument technician, a patient teacher who loved mechanics, woodwork, coding, and the outdoors. He showed me how systems speak if you pay attention, how machines and circuits carry signals that tell their own story. He valued curiosity and agency, and those values seeped into me. If something is not working, take it apart, trace the connections, and listen until it shows itself. That was my first taste of coherence, though I did not yet have a name for it.

In time, that instinct found new material. At the University of Alberta I studied biological sciences for a year, learning that living systems follow their own kind of circuitry, full of feedback and adaptation. When I transferred to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to study computer engineering, those same lessons took a different shape. I learned to trace not only current but logic, to build and test circuits where electrons followed intention, and to write code that taught machines how to decide. Later, working within the credit union system, I helped maintain networks and banking infrastructure, supported branches through the Y2K transition, and joined the effort to integrate rural Bank of Montreal branches into regional cooperatives. These were systems too, pulsing with information and trust, and when they faltered the same patience was required. Listening was still the work.

Through all of it — experiments in code, wiring, and signal — I felt something I could not quite define. It was not ambition in the usual sense, nor the pursuit of mastery for its own sake. It felt more like a gravity, a quiet signal at the center of things. I did not know what it was, only that I kept circling it, closer with each turn.

A Life in Systems

I carried that pull from lab benches and server rooms into the trades. Becoming an electrician meant working inside systems I could touch. Residential wiring, industrial plants, commercial buildings, structured cabling, automation, and controls. Each environment had its own rhythms and risks, but all of them revealed the same truth: systems are alive in their own way. They adapt, they fail, they reveal patterns if you know how to look.

The parallels were immediate. The same logic that governed data flow through networks governed current through conduit. Circuits and code both demanded clarity, feedback, and precision. Small oversights could ripple outward, distorting the whole. Working in the trades returned theory to muscle memory. It grounded the abstract discipline of computation in heat, noise, and consequence.

It did not take long before I realized the parallels between electrical systems and human ones. When I moved into entrepreneurship, building ventures meant wiring together people, ideas, and incentives instead of circuits and relays. The challenges felt familiar. Misaligned connections. Broken feedback loops. Power flowing in unintended directions. I had seen this before in distribution panels and control systems. Now I was seeing it in boardrooms and balance sheets.

Over time my focus widened. From ventures I was drawn toward governance, finance, technology, and eventually foundations. These were larger and more abstract systems, but they carried the same questions. Why are they designed the way they are? What values are embedded in their structure? Why do some hold together while others fracture under pressure? The more I worked, the more I realized I was not only interested in fixing problems within systems, but in asking how the systems themselves might be redesigned to serve resilience rather than fragility.

Every stage seemed different on the surface, yet the pattern was always the same. Circuits, ventures, institutions — each was another orbit around the same unnamed gravity. Coherence kept pulling me closer, even before I had language for it.

The Diagnostic Instinct

If there is one thread that ties all of my careers together, it is troubleshooting.

Whether tracing a short circuit on an industrial site, debugging a software configuration, or sitting in a governance meeting where trust had collapsed, I found myself drawn to the same practice: listening for where coherence had been lost.

Troubleshooting begins with restraint. You do not rush to impose your will. You resist the urge for quick fixes. Instead, you slow down and let the system reveal itself. In circuits, this might mean following the flow of current step by step until you find where it falters. In human systems, it means listening carefully, noticing the misalignments in incentives or communication, and recognizing when feedback loops are no longer carrying truth.

The instinct is less about control than about stewardship. I was never satisfied with patching over symptoms. I wanted to hear the deeper signal beneath the noise. And once I found it, the repair often seemed obvious, almost effortless, because the system itself already wanted to return to coherence. My job was simply to help it remember how.

That instinct carried me everywhere. It shaped how I built ventures, how I worked in teams, how I thought about governance and finance. Whether the materials were wires, code, policies, or incentives, the work was always the same: listen, trace, and restore coherence.

Fractures and Catalysts

Listening closely to systems also meant facing their fractures.

In companies, I saw incentives pulling people in opposite directions, draining trust even as everyone worked hard. In finance, I encountered structures that seemed less about creating value and more about extracting it, leaving foundations weaker over time. I had seen softer versions of this in the back rooms of information systems, where legacy cores and local autonomy tugged against each other until coherence depended on careful translation and trust. In governance, I watched brittle frameworks strain under complexity, unable to adapt quickly enough. In technology, I saw powerful tools amplifying signals without caring whether those signals aligned with truth or coherence.

The pattern was always familiar. Circuits break when a single joint corrodes. Organizations falter when one connection of trust gives way. Entire systems collapse when feedback loops lose their integrity. None of it was random. These fractures repeated across domains because they were structural.

Catalysts came in many forms. Some were professional. I remember ventures that carried brilliant ideas but buckled under misaligned incentives, like a circuit overloaded by currents it was never designed to carry. Projects that failed not for lack of talent but because the rules of the system made coherence impossible.

Others were personal. Moments of loss that forced me to ask what holds when everything else breaks. Times when resilience was not just a principle but a necessity. Each catalyst brought me closer to the recognition that patching symptoms was never going to be enough.

At a certain point I made a choice. Instead of treating every fracture in isolation, I began searching for the common center. If patterns of collapse echoed across so many domains, then perhaps coherence itself was deeper than any single field. To find it meant questioning what we take for granted. It meant asking what happens when you follow the pull all the way to the source.

Questioning Constants

Searching for the center meant questioning what I had once treated as fixed. Every field has its constants, whether they are physical numbers, economic assumptions, or cultural rules. They provide stability, but they can also limit imagination. Once something is labeled unchangeable, we often stop asking how it came to be or whether it might shift depending on perspective.

There came a moment when I asked what seemed like a very small but profound question. What if a particular constant was not as fixed as we believed? What if it looked steady only because of the lens we were using? That question happened to be in physics, but the impulse could have applied anywhere.

I had glimpsed hints of this before. In geometry, for example, the familiar ratio of a circle depends on the surface you measure it on. A circle drawn on a flat plane carries one value. A circle traced on a curved surface reveals another. Constants are not always absolute. Sometimes they are contextual. Computing had taught me a similar lesson. Change the substrate, precision, or architecture, and what seemed unshakable resolves into something conditional.

When I allowed myself to follow this thought, something shifted, and a Cambrian explosion followed. What I had long treated as solid boundaries began to look more like shadows, cast by a deeper generative source. Shadows feel stable because we see them every day, but they are only glimpses of what produces them. If we mistake the shadow for the whole, we miss the process that created it.

The Pattern Emerges

What surfaced was not a theory in the conventional sense. It felt more like recognition. I was not building something new so much as noticing what had always been there. A structure that quietly holds both the natural world and human systems together, repeating at every scale.

The pattern revealed itself through recurring principles:

• Projection, the way inner structures take shape in outer form.
• Recursion, the way processes repeat and deepen at new scales.
• Integration, how disparate parts find relation.
• Emergence and coalescence, when new wholes come into being.
• Feedback and memory, the way systems learn and carry forward.
• Choice and alignment, where agency meets gravity.
• Relationality and discreteness, the coexistence of clarity and connection.
• And coherence, the resonance of all these principles working in concert, like a bus finally carrying a clear signal.

I realized I had been working with these principles for years without naming them. I saw them in circuits and in ventures, in governance frameworks and financial systems. The parallels were not coincidence. They were evidence of a symbolic substrate, an engine beneath the surface that becomes visible once you know how to look.

It is tempting to call this a theory of everything, but that would be misleading. What I found was not a final explanation, but a generative stance. Less a closed system of knowledge, more an engine that allows anything to emerge. Not a theory of everything, but an engine for anything.

From Circling to Centering

Looking back, I see that I had been circling the center all along. Each stage of my life — working as an electrician, studying and designing computer systems, building ventures, troubleshooting organizations, exploring governance and finance — was another loop of the spiral. At the time, they felt like separate chapters. Now I recognize them as successive orbits, each carrying me closer to the gravity that had always been there.

Circling became centering when I stopped treating these experiences as disconnected fragments. What had felt like detours were actually recursive steps. Each cycle gave me a new language for the same principle: coherence in circuits, coherence in code, coherence in ventures, coherence in governance, coherence in physical and symbolic systems. The center was never a single answer waiting to be found. It was a way of listening that revealed itself again and again.

To center is not to arrive at final truth. It is to align with the generative process itself. Centering is what happens when attention, curiosity, and stewardship converge.

Applications and Entrepreneurship

This way of listening is not abstract. It has practical consequences for how systems can be built and rebuilt. I began to see ventures, projects, and collaborations as living experiments in coherence.

In technology and artificial intelligence, the challenge is interpretability by design. Systems need to learn through feedback and choice, carrying memory forward without losing relationality. In governance, the work is designing adaptive structures where incentives cohere across scales. In finance, it is about moving from extraction toward regeneration, building resilience rather than eroding it. In culture and education, it is about honoring individuality while cultivating integration and emergence.

The lesson from those early systems never left me. If people cannot read how a thing works, it will not hold when it matters. Entrepreneurship, for me, became less about building companies and more about stewarding coherence. A venture is not just a product or service. It is a system that listens, adapts, and aligns. When designed well, it becomes a bridge between the symbolic substrate and lived practice.

What unites all these applications is more than formulas or theories. It is a stance: the willingness to question what seems constant, to trace feedback loops, to listen for coherence, and to align with what emerges. Entrepreneurship, in this sense, is not about control or prediction. It is about participating in the generativity of systems.

The Invitation

The story I have shared is not a conclusion. It is a movement, a spiral that keeps unfolding. Each time I thought I had arrived, I discovered it was only another orbit. Circling the center is not about reaching a destination. It is about living in relation to the gravity that keeps revealing itself.

The constants I once questioned showed me that nothing is as fixed as it seems. The fractures I witnessed revealed that what looks broken often carries the seed of renewal. The catalysts I lived through reminded me that disruption can be an opening toward alignment. And the pattern that emerged has shown me that coherence is not fragile or rare. It is woven into everything, waiting to be recognized.

I do not hold a theory of everything. What I hold is a way of listening, a stance of curiosity, and a commitment to stewarding coherence wherever it appears. My journey has carried me through computation and trades, entrepreneurship, governance, and symbolic exploration of foundations, but the center remains the same. It is the quiet signal that has been calling me since the beginning.

So this is not an ending but an invitation. An invitation to question your own constants. To trace the feedback loops in the systems you live within. To notice the patterns that repeat across scales. To circle the center in your own way, and to see what emerges when you do.

If this resonates, then you are already part of the work. The center is not mine alone. It is something we discover together, orbit by orbit, as we learn to listen more deeply to the gravity that has always been there.