Field Notes Newsletter, May 2025
Last time I wrote to you, I shared some thoughts about the stories we carry—about health, aging, and what it means to live inside a body that doesn’t always follow the script.
Lately, I’ve been trying to listen more deeply to my own.
This month, I’ve committed to a quiet experiment: waking at 4am each morning to write. One page. Or one hour. Whichever comes first. No agenda, no outcome—simply a willingness to meet whatever’s been hovering there, asking for my attention.
Light
Dark
And here’s what I’m noticing:
No matter how much I write during the day—about health, about longevity, about the power of narrative—there are still stories that don’t get told. My stories.
The ones that led me toward Functional Medicine, and then showed me what it was missing. The ones that pulled me into Narrative Medicine—not as theory, but as necessity. The ones that shaped my questions about resilience, about how we hold change over time, and about what healing really means when the arc isn’t linear.
This daily ritual isn’t about fixing. It’s not about productivity, or progress, or even clarity.
It’s about sitting quietly at the edge of what I don’t yet know—unlayering, listening, and following the thread of a question back to where it began. It’s a kind of attention that feels tender. And rare. A kind of witnessing that doesn’t rush toward resolution.
Some might call it a different kind of optimization. But for me, it’s more a kind of remembering—one that honors meaning as much as measurement, and treats lived experience as something worthy of my time.
Worthy enough, even, to set the alarm clock for the ungodly hour of 4am.
What I’m capturing aren’t just the polished insights, but the raw and unfinished ones too. There are connections and surprises I could never have planned—emergent truths that only seem to reveal themselves on the page. Despite my very active mind, well practiced at making connections, they never quite arrived in the same way anywhere else but here, on the page.
Later in this letter, I’ll share a brief passage from those early morning pages. But first, I want to offer a few reflections on where story meets science—and what becomes possible when we begin to trust our own narrative intelligence.
Warmly,
Andrea
P.S. In addition to sharing one of my early morning letters and offering a writing prompt below, if something here resonates—or if you're writing your own quiet truths—I’d love to hear from you. You can always hit reply to this email and let me know what’s stirring for you.
What I’m Exploring
I’ve been sitting with what it means to let story and science live side by side—especially in conversations about longevity.
So much of the current dialogue around living longer is filled with strategies for control: blood sugar monitoring, protein optimization, mitochondrial support, sleep tracking, genetic testing and hormones to replace what’s naturally declined. The list goes on. And on. Future technologies promise steering wheels and toilet seats that track our biometrics and report data before we even reach the clinic.
These may very well be valuable in certain instances. But they’re also rooted in a very particular cultural story—one that equates aging with failure, and control with salvation..
A story that says: if you do it right, and we know what you (or your body) are doing wrong, you might live longer.
That longevity is a puzzle to solve.
That age can be defied—or at least delayed—with the “right plan” and comprehensive data.
But what happens when the science isn’t as clear as promised? When the path forward isn’t linear? When life throws something unexpected our way, and our body doesn’t respond the way the protocol predicted?
That’s where narrative matters.
Because no matter how much data we gather, healing doesn’t happen in numbers alone. It happens in context—in the emotional, environmental, and lived reality of our life.
““Our cultures also define and confine aging. We age in contexts, such as families, communities, groups, and nations, that communicate possibilities and limits about everything, including age.” ”
Longevity, too, is not just about adding years. It’s about making meaning—even when the path is uncertain. And meaning lives in story. The story of how we’ve cared for ourselves. The story of what we’ve endured. The story of who we want to become—even now. And the story of how and where we make time and space to honor all of the journeys.
Much of this inquiry has been catalyzed by my work inside The Long View, where we’ve been examining aging through a different lens—not just one of optimization, but of reflection, identity, and presence. I’ve found myself immersed in myriad perspectives on aging and longevity—the yin and the yang, the physiological and the psychological, the measurable and the mysterious.
One of the tools I created for our conversations is called the Appetite Handout, which invites us to consider what we’re truly hungry for—not in terms of food, but in our relationship to information and knowing. Our appetite for knowledge versus our appetite for privacy.
And I’ve found myself wondering: What if our longing for longevity isn’t really about living longer—but about being seen? About feeling safe? About reclaiming parts of ourselves we were taught to suppress or ignore—or perhaps cannot yet see—in favor of the biological crystal ball.
Ultimately, what if the story we tell about aging matters just as much as what we do to support the body we inhabit—today and into whatever comes next?
What I’m Writing
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been rising before dawn this month to write. The writing is not meant for publication. For now, it’s just where I meet myself in the quiet.
Still, something is taking shape. And I want to share a passage from one of those mornings—not because it’s complete, but because it’s real. Some of those entries, like this one, take shape in the form of letters to my late husband, Isamu:
Dear Isamu,
There’s so much to tell you. This summer it will be 23 years since you died. I’ve been without you more than twice as long as I was with you, and yet, in so many ways, my life is still (and will forever be) a love letter to you.
I wish you could see Gilbert. There are moments when he presents with interests so reminiscent of you that it makes me question nature vs. nurture. His brief fascination with Adorno in high school. His passion for playing pool. Or the time he came home from college, sat down at the piano, and started playing Linus and Lucy by Vince Guaraldi. That was one of your favorites. Maybe it’s not so strange since it’s such a popular jazz soundtrack, and he loves jazz, but when his long fingers ran over the keys, he cocked his head and asked, “Do you know who wrote this?”
I felt a little stunned. I answered and then walked over to the big mid-century CD cabinet you had custom-built to hold your jewels—the one that still sits right where you installed it. I pulled the disc from one of the heavy drawers. “Look.” I held up the square plastic case with Linus bent over the tiny red toy piano, and paused.
“Your dad would have liked you very much,” I said.
“Of course he would,” Gilbert answered—not in arrogance, but in the innocent way of someone who believes parent love is pure, unquestionable. You would really like him, though. You two would play chess, and poker, and you would have taught him Go, all while discussing philosophy and politics, cultivating a competitive spirit. Music playing in the background, sometimes surfacing to the foreground of conversation. You would have introduced him to the classic tastes of a smoky scotch and a perfectly balanced Manhattan. These were not my strengths as his parent.
But would Gilbert be who he is if you had been here to father him?
Honestly, he doesn’t miss you because he didn’t know you to miss, and I did everything I could to fill the gaps, leaving him with little to grieve. I don’t think he felt an absence, other than maybe a theoretical one—the kind that only emerges when someone asks, “Where’s your father?” Or when he’s the only one among his peers who doesn’t have a dad.
But I miss you for him. Still. I don’t know that it will ever end.
What Gilbert and I share is different from what he would have had with you. Your intellect. Your playfulness. Your pure love and laughter that could cut through silence like a bench knife through bread dough, splitting a simple moment into delight. The pointed gaze of disapproval that radiated through your dark brown eyes spoke volumes to your brother and me in those rare moments when you were unhappy with one of our actions. We always knew when you questioned something we did or said, and we wanted to please you. You had a presence that quietly compelled those close to you to want to please you. That was a sexy characteristic.
But what would that gaze have been like for a son who wanted to please you?
And who would I be? Who would I be if the guardrails and the years of rearing had been shared? With you?
Gilbert lives in Manhattan now. But he’s moving to Tokyo at the end of summer! Can you believe it? He’s been teaching himself Japanese, studying for hours each day as far as I can tell—some days on the kanji and written language, others on pronunciation. It reminds me of you teaching yourself to code. I’ll admit that it took me a minute to absorb that he wanted to live so far away and to see it as a strength of his, not a weakness of mine.
When he applied to the language immersion program in Tokyo, he wrote about your father, not you. At first, it felt like an omission. But it makes sense.
In his essay, he wrote about how his interest in Japan is driven not just by the culture and cities but by a language that both confounds and captivates him. He wrote about how his grandfather was ethnically Japanese but grew up in Hawaii, with English as his primary language, leaving Gilbert with only faint echoes of Japanese culture and none of the language itself. And how this program represents a chance to reconnect with a part of his lineage that has always been more mystery than memory.
More mystery than memory. Like you, to him, I imagine.
When he shared the essay for my review, as we often do with our writing, I asked him why he hadn’t mentioned you, and he said he didn’t know how it was applicable.
And in that moment, I realized that losing you is my story. Not his.
Several months later, we walked through Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn on a cloudy afternoon, moving from archery in Industry City to hot pot in Sunset Park. The air was crisp and thin, and the warmth of the day had faded, leaving Gilbert a bit chilled in his choice of jackets as the sun was setting.
The towering, gothic arches at the entrance loomed like silent sentinels as we entered, and the sprawling grounds felt both vast and intimate—the endless rows of weathered headstones with etched names fading into stone, marble angels, and skeletal branches of the ancient oak trees. In this place where the dead are both present and long gone, I told him about my realization. How losing you is a story that belongs more to me than to him.
He nodded and shared his lifelong awkwardness around telling this inherited story. So close, yet so far. Maybe also the weight of other people’s responses, what gets projected onto him when he says his father is dead.
When he was little—two or three years old—if someone asked where his dad was, he would say, very matter-of-factly, “My dad died.” And you did. You died. We knew that to be true. But hearing those words come out of a small, plump, red-headed cherub usually took people by surprise. That reaction was likely one Gilbert noticed and began to avoid. We exist in context and that context shapes us.
The gravel crunched under our feet, the air thick with the sense of being watched, not by the dead but by the living—the city’s noise bleeding in through the gates on the east side of the cemetery. Our conversation shifted to Japanese pop and the Shibuya-kei music scene. I mentioned that you used to listen to a Japanese pop band whose name I couldn’t remember, but it was on the tip of my tongue.
We talked about the nostalgic, ironic sound of that music. And finally, Gilbert said, “Pizzicato Five.” And he was right. That was the band you used to play on your coveted stereo, several CDs stacked together in the “P” section of the heavy drawers of the oak cabinet.
The song Baby Love Child played in my mind as we walked through the cemetery’s exit.
You love me yes you do
You don’t need to tell me
I know you love me most
No one else can take my place
Believe me, you do
Forever, and ever
Narrative Medicine Invitation
Set your timer for 5 minutes and write freely to the following prompt:
Write a letter to someone who shaped you, but isn’t here to see who you’ve become.
Feel free to send your writing to me at scribe@andreanakayama.com
