Returning Home: Reflections on Family and Self Through Sound

Spending time with family is never just about the visit—it’s about the history, the patterns, the quiet moments that stretch between conversations. It’s about returning to a version of yourself you thought you outgrew, only to realize how much of it still lives in you.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how being around family can be its own kind of meditation. There’s something about sitting across from your parents, seeing your mannerisms reflected back at you, hearing a familiar tone in someone else’s voice—and realizing, that’s me too.

The Mirror of Family

Being home—physically or emotionally—means stepping into an environment that shaped you. It can be comforting. It can be challenging. Often, it’s both. You catch glimpses of the traits you’ve carried forward: maybe a stubbornness, a certain way of handling stress, a deep sense of care. And then there are the things you’ve tried to unlearn, the parts you’re gently rewriting in yourself.

It’s not about judgment. It’s about awareness. Noticing the echoes of your upbringing in your adult self and asking, Do I want to keep this? Or do I want to shift it?

The Practice of Patience

Family dynamics aren’t always easy. Old stories resurface. Roles we thought we shed reappear without warning. But what I’ve learned is that these moments, though sometimes difficult, are invitations—to slow down, to respond rather than react, to extend the same compassion we offer to strangers back to the people who raised us.

In that way, being with family becomes a practice, one not so different from meditation: sit with it, breathe through it, notice what comes up, and let it move.

How Ambient Music Mirrors This Process

There’s a parallel for me in the ambient music I create as Six Missing. So much of ambient composition is about space, patience, and reflection. There’s no rush. No hard start or stop. Just the slow unfolding of texture, the subtle shifts that ask you to notice rather than chase.

Just like in family relationships, there’s room for tension and release, for moments of dissonance and deep harmony. Sometimes a single drone or melody line will repeat and shift so slightly that you don’t realize it’s changed until you’re fully immersed in something new.

Creating this kind of music has taught me to listen more closely, to be with what’s present without needing to fix it—a skill that’s just as important when navigating the nuances of family.

An Invitation to Reflect

If you’re spending time with family, or even just thinking about your roots, I invite you to approach it like you would a quiet piece of music:

• Pause. Notice what emotions arise.

• Listen for what’s beneath the surface. Not everything is loud or obvious.

• Allow space. Sometimes just being together is enough.

And if you need something to help ease into that reflective space, I’ve curated a playlist called Meditative Moments, full of ambient tracks that hold space for introspection, including subtle field recordings and gentle textures that mirror these emotional landscapes:

🎧 Follow & Save Meditative Moments

Whether you’re sitting with your parents at the kitchen table or alone with a memory, know that the process of noticing, reflecting, and evolving is sacred. And you don’t have to rush it.

Until next time,
Your fellow human just being.

• Six Missing

A blog.

So, you might ask yourself, “what is TJ doing writing a blog? Doesn’t he already do so much?” And the answer is well…I don’t know and…yes.

I thought it could be fun to start a longer form writing practice as I’ve found my newsletters can get a little wordy. But that’s the thing - I am so passionate about what I do and how I do it that I find it nearly impossible to condense it down to what are essentially bullet-pointed thoughts in a newsletter.

Alas, we’ve arrived at “the blog.”

I suppose you could say I missed the boat back in the early 2000s when everyone was blogging and writing posts - I think it would’ve probably helped me become more popular within the Instagram world earlier too had I done that. But I was too busy occupying myself with other things - namely music. Truthfully, I didn’t even really understand the purpose of Instagram when it first started. Share photos? Why? But very quickly the photos became a way to reach people and then people saw the power of that and figured out a way to upload videos. But then the videos could be used as a way to brand yourself and now you’re competing with actual brands so your videos had to get better; look better, sound better, be snappier. And now we’re making Reels and the trend is to make a 6 second reel, so on and so on…

It’s massively overwhelming being an artist, period. I don’t care what time you were or are one, it’s hard. Off the bat you’re a person who likely “feels” more than your average person so you’re acutely aware of human emotions, the human condition, nature, animals, all of it. Take that “feelingmachine” and drop it into a world where you have to advocate for yourself and your art 24 hours a day and you’ve got yourself quite the situation. But I actually love it. I love sharing my work and who I am and how I make my art. I truly enjoy hearing about the connections it makes with people and not in the self-stroking-ego way, but in the way that makes me feel truly good that I was able to drop some positivity into this chaotic world.

Here we are now. Coming back to the blog.

Is blogging more or less journaling? Maybe I’ll use it that way. There are already so many people out there using longform blogs as a way to catalogue their methods and work so I don’t feel the need to fill that void. Rather, I want to share more about who I am and the person that is behind my work. Perhaps you’ll find things that you connect with and say “hey, I feel that too!”

Okay, so. Blogging. Blogging.

Time see where this goes!