The Loop and The Wire

On change, creativity, and the genius of not-knowing

Every morning I walk the same loop. Same path, same trees, same rhythm underfoot. But it’s never really the same. Some days the grass is wet with dew. Some days it’s brittle and loud. The sky changes its tone. Birds come and go. My thoughts move differently, too.

One morning, I heard a sound I hadn’t heard before—a sharp, hollow drumming. I paused and spotted a red-bellied woodpecker tapping away at a tree. It’s a misleading name—it doesn’t have a red belly at all. The red is on its head, like a little crown.

That detail—the wrongness of the name, the rightness of the moment—delighted me. I stopped longer than I meant to, just watching. The next day, I returned to the same tree. The bird was gone.

This is what creative work feels like.

You walk the same loop: the same notebook, the same chord shapes, the same tools. You don’t know what you’re hoping for. You just know you need to be present enough to notice when something new shows up. You can't force the woodpecker. But you can miss it if you're not looking.

There’s a theory in math and physics called the Chern–Simons invariant. You don’t need the equations. What it does is measure how a system transforms as it moves through a loop. It doesn’t track each small change—it tracks the shape of the transformation itself.

Imagine stirring cream into coffee. The swirl isn’t chaos—it has a shape. The Chern–Simons invariant is a way of saying, “Here’s how that swirl evolved.” It’s not about controlling what changes. It’s about noticing what stays true across the change.

That’s the creative process.

You return again and again to the same structure, not to recreate the same moment, but to re-encounter yourself in a new one. The form holds, the details shift. That’s how meaning accumulates—in the space between repetition and change.

The man who helped develop the Chern–Simons theory, James Simons, eventually left academia and founded Renaissance Technologies, the most successful hedge fund in history. But they didn’t fill the office with Wall Street people. They hired code-breakers, physicists, linguists—people who knew nothing about finance. People with tools, curiosity, and no allegiance to conventional wisdom.

They didn’t predict the market. They built a system that could feel its subtle twists. They walked the loop—not because they always knew what they’d find, but because they knew that if they walked it enough, something rare would reveal itself.

And it did. They made billions. But they almost never talk about it. Their system doesn’t work at scale. It was never built to change the world. Just to see it clearly, in their own way. And that was enough to make a lot of people quietly rich.

Is that good for society? It’s not for me to say. But I know this: the outsize reward rarely goes to the person playing someone else’s game. It goes to the one who builds their own loop, walks it faithfully, and dares to listen when something strange calls from the trees.

This is what artists do, too.

You don’t write a great song because you have a plan.

You write it because you returned to the loop—again—and this time something showed up.

A phrase, a shape, a bird with a red head and the wrong name.

Genius is not found in control.

Genius is found in structure plus presence.

In discipline plus openness.

In building a form that can contain surprise.

The line between genius and insanity is razor thin. You must walk the wire to get there. You must return to the loop, even when it feels like nothing will happen. That’s where the music lives. Not in the noise, not in the stillness—but in the pattern just beneath both.

You’re not meant to know everything.

You’re meant to show up.

You’re meant to notice.

You’re meant to build the wire, and walk it, again and again, until something takes flight.