Lately, I’ve felt a subtle dissonance every time I hover over the “Subscribe” button on Substack. Not because I don’t want to support writers -- many of them deserve to be paid far more than what a newsletter subscription offers -- but because something about the exchange feels… off. Like I’m participating in a subtle shift I can’t quite name. A gate quietly swinging shut behind me.

This painting started with a headline: 23andMe sold to the highest bidder.

I don’t know why it hit me so hard. Maybe because I’d always thought of it as something intimate – blood, family, the story of who we are. Suddenly it was just... data. A portfolio asset. Another thing to be packaged and sold. And I felt something in me ache.

That moment became the inspiration for this painting.

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe, where they describe reality not as a fixed series of events, but as a set of possibilities. At the most fundamental level, the universe is not deterministic — it’s made of likelihoods. Everything that can happen, does happen… somewhere. And what we really experience is just one thread through that vast probabilistic fabric.

Every few years or so, I sit down with myself and examine my values, attitudes, and beliefs.

I learned to do this at university, in a sociology class I half paid attention to. I don’t remember much else from that course, but that idea lodged itself somewhere deep.

So between the new year and my birthday in February, I do what I’ve come to call a ‘life audit’. I take stock. To ask what habits and thoughts have served me -- what needed to be shed, what still feels like mine, and what have I been carrying simply because it’s familiar?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces in between.

The parts of life that don’t show up in performance reviews or product roadmaps. The quiet places between a decision and its ripple. Between precision and intuition. Between what we can measure… and what actually matters.