All You Touch

There are moments in life that quietly become fault lines.

You don’t recognize them when they happen. They don’t arrive with fireworks or a narrator announcing, This will matter forever.

Ironically, sometimes they arrive with a soundtrack.

When I was sixteen, my skin wasn’t actually that bad.

Moderately bad would be more accurate.

Unfortunately, my parents viewed even moderate acne as a potential threat to my long-term romantic prospects. Given that I was already an exceptionally odd child, they seemed to conclude that reducing any additional liabilities was simply prudent portfolio management.

So every few weeks, I’d make the pilgrimage to my dermatologist’s office on Mowry Avenue in Fremont. My dermatologist was Dr. Katie Rodan - brilliant, kind, and impossibly glamorous. Years later she’d become famous for co-founding Proactiv and, later, Rodan + Fields. At the time, though, she was simply the person tasked with improving my complexion before my parents concluded I’d be living alone with seventeen cats.

Most visits involved her assistant performing what was delicately referred to as “acne surgery.”

This is an unnecessarily elegant term for someone enthusiastically popping pimples with minimal scarring.

A few years later, at nineteen, my parents doubled down and encouraged me to take Accutane. For anyone who hasn’t experienced it, imagine turning your entire body into parchment paper. My lips cracked. My skin peeled. I couldn’t produce enough moisture to lubricate a raisin.

On the upside, I lost twenty pounds.

It also marked the only time in my life I can remember my parents referring to me as “hot.”

Families are weird. But I digress…

After one particularly savage pimple-popping session on Mowry Ave, I climbed back into my car and turned on the radio.

Pink Floyd’s Breathe began to play.

Not just the song.

The slide guitar.

The spaciousness.

The feeling that someone had somehow translated consciousness into sound.

Then came the lyric:

“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

I sat there completely still.

The dermatologist’s office was directly across the street from the Wherehouse at the Fremont Hub, so instead of driving home, I simply pulled across the intersection, walked inside, and bought Dark Side of the Moon.

Sometimes the shortest journeys end up taking you the farthest.

That album has been one of my favorites ever since.

In April of 1994, during my first year at UC Santa Cruz, Pink Floyd announced The Division Bell tour.

Three nights.

Oakland Coliseum.

I bought tickets to one show with a group of friends.

Then another opportunity came up.

Then another.

Somehow, I ended up with tickets to all three nights.

The first concert was exactly what you’d hope.

Friends.

Laughing.

Singing every lyric.

Collective excitement.

The second night was equally incredible with a different group.

But it was the third night that changed me.

I went alone.

As soon as I sat down, I ate a bag of mushrooms, settled into my seat, and decided to simply observe.

No dancing.

No talking.

No performing enthusiasm because everyone else was.

Just watching.

The stage.

The lights.

The crowd.

The enormous bowl of the Coliseum.

The strange miracle of fifty thousand complete strangers sharing the same emotional experience at exactly the same moment.

Then they played Breathe.

I’ve heard that song hundreds of times since.

It has never sounded the way it did that night.

The music seemed impossibly beautiful.

Every note hung in the air.

Time slowed into something almost tangible.

And once again, those lyrics landed.

“All you touch and all you see…”

Only this time they didn’t feel like poetry.

They felt like truth.

I experienced something I had never quite experienced before.

A profound sense of connection to something much larger than myself.

Psychologists sometimes describe this as an oceanic feeling; a temporary dissolving of the boundaries between self and world. Jung might have called it an encounter with the Self, that deeper organizing center of the psyche that occasionally breaks through the noise of the ego.

Whatever vocabulary you prefer, I remember one thing with absolute certainty.

Joy.

Not excitement.

Not pleasure.

Joy.

There’s a difference.

Excitement is loud.

Pleasure is fleeting.

Joy is quiet.

It settles into your bones.

For years, I thought that experience belonged to that concert.

I was wrong.

Looking back, I’d felt echoes of it before.

As a teenager at Penrhos College in Perth, there were moments during chapel when the same feeling would quietly arrive. Standing shoulder to shoulder, singing hymns beneath the round stained glass windows, I’d occasionally feel something impossible to describe.

It wasn’t really about religion.

It certainly wasn’t about doctrine.

It was the feeling itself.

A sense of boundlessness.

A quiet recognition that I was part of something infinitely larger than myself.

The Pink Floyd concert didn’t create that experience.

It simply gave me a language for recognizing it.

These days, it appears without invitation.

One of the most profound moments happened during the pandemic.

I was driving to Cape Cod before sunrise.

The roads were nearly empty.

My companions:  my usual Spotify track and a cup of coffee.

No conversation.

No destination more exciting than another workday.

Then I rounded a bend going down Highway 24 and the entire sky exploded into color.

Layers of gold.

Crimson.

Orange.

Lavender.

The kind of sunrise that makes you instinctively take your foot off the accelerator because your brain can’t quite process what your eyes are seeing.

There was no concert.

No orchestra.

No mushrooms.

No crowd.

No reason whatsoever to expect inspiration.

Just me, alone in my car, witnessing a sunrise that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

I laughed out loud.

Not because anything was funny.

Because the sheer improbability of existing in a universe capable of producing something so breathtaking felt almost too much to contain.

That’s when I realized the oceanic feeling had never belonged to Pink Floyd.

Pink Floyd had simply been one of its best messengers.

Art doesn't create wonder. It reminds us that we already know how to feel it. 

One of the great misconceptions about music is that it’s simply entertainment.

Sometimes it is.

But at its best, music becomes architecture for the nervous system.

It organizes emotion.

It regulates physiology.

It retrieves memories that words alone can never reach.

Long before I knew anything about neurodivergence, sensory regulation, or the neuroscience of emotion, I instinctively used music as medicine.

I wasn’t escaping reality.

I was returning to it.

When I hear Breathe today, I don’t merely remember a period of my life.

I reconnect with the person I was in that moment.

That’s the remarkable thing about meaningful music.

It doesn’t just preserve memories.

It preserves states of consciousness.

I can put on Breathe today (without the mushrooms, thankfully) and almost instantly reconnect with that same feeling of coherence.

The noise quiets.

The static disappears.

The world feels intelligible again.

For someone whose mind has always run at full speed, that’s no small gift.

Our culture spends an extraordinary amount of energy convincing us that happiness exists just beyond the next milestone.

The next promotion.

The next relationship.

The next accomplishment.

The next version of ourselves.

Pink Floyd offered a different proposition.

Pay attention.

This is your life.

Not after you’ve fixed yourself.

Not after your skin clears.

Not after you’ve finally become attractive enough.

Not after you’ve proven your worth.

Now.

“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

For years, I thought that lyric was about limitation.

Now I think it’s about presence.

Life isn’t waiting somewhere else.

It isn’t hiding behind another achievement or another reinvention.

It has been here all along, quietly unfolding through whatever we choose to notice.

I’ve spent much of my life chasing understanding.

Psychology.

Mythology.

Human behavior.

Power.

Patterns.

Meaning.

What I’ve slowly discovered is that understanding isn’t the highest human experience.

Wonder is.

Sometimes wonder arrives through a Pink Floyd album.

Sometimes through an old hymn sung in a school chapel.

Sometimes through a sunrise over Cape Cod that nobody else happens to see.

The trick isn’t finding extraordinary moments.

They’re everywhere.

The trick is becoming the kind of person who can recognize them when they appear.

After all…all you touch and all you see… 

Really is all your life will ever be.