Sometime just before 1300, Salvino D'Armati was a glassmaker married to a master seamstress. As they grew old together, D'Armati noticed that his wife would have to hold her needlework closer and closer to her face. Some evenings, she would set aside her work entirely, her eyes too strained to continue. She was beginning to lose her sight, and D'Armati caught onto this.

As a glassmaker, D'Armati began experimenting with his craft, playing with various curves and thicknesses of glass to test how they could magnify objects at different lengths. This experimentation would lead him to create one of the earliest historical accounts of glasses, allowing his wife to continue her work and, as an indirect gift, to see the world clearly again.

In 1920, a Johnson & Johnson employee, Earle Dickson noticed that his wife Josephine would frequently cut and burn herself while cooking. He went on to produce a prototype of a product that allowed her to dress her wounds without the assistance of a medical professional, or even another person for that matter. Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, which went on to mass-produce and market the product as the Band-Aid.

When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my mom juggled anywhere between 3 jobs at a single time. I would wake up to the sounds of her leaving the house early in the morning before 6AM. She would work at an automotive factory until 3PM, and then quickly drive over to an afternoon shift at a bakery that was about 45 minutes away from home. After her shift at the bakery ended, often late at 10PM, she would come home at around 11PM and cater food to be delivered to other local Vietnamese families to earn additional income. I'm not sure where she found the time to sleep. Looking back now, I recognize that my mom simply cared about us so much. Her labour was a manifestation of love.

There are certain lengths that labour can be taken to, and I believe you can only get that far when you work with an unbearable amount of care.

When we love someone or something deeply, I believe we can become completely absorbed in the labour of caring. There are many such cases of projects being produced out of intense care for things outside of ourselves.

In my formative high-school years, I prepared a whole promposal video to surprise my then-girlfriend at the time. I had filmed a 2 minute-long skit of me running around the school, only to find myself in a dinosaur onesie outside of the cafeteria at the end of the video. As the video cuts in the room — I enter the door in real-time to prompose with a sign behind my head, begging the question, "Prom?". Now that I think back on it, this is probably one of the earlier, higher quality "stunts" that I had ever done in my life.

She said yes.

I think it was through experiences like this I had become sure of the idea that caring is fun and worthwhile. I also think somewhere along growing up, I minimized the amount of activation energy required to express care, because my mom showed me the powerful feeling of what it's like to be cared for. To work hard for something that matters to you. To share things with the people that you care for. To be privileged enough to be in a position to give, and to be on the receiving end of those gifts.

I believe this is an innate human desire that we sometimes forget about in the midst of our routines and monotony. We lose this sense when we think about how things need to make sense. I find these muscles atrophying over time when I am too focused on constraints, costs, as well as my own limiting beliefs of what I am capable of and what is "realistic". I think we can realistically care a lot more about the people in our lives. I believe it's worth caring about the things that we end up creating for others for them to hold in their hands, wear on their heads, sit on their shelves, live in their vases, or to sink their time and attention into.

"There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." — Vincent van Gogh