Nowhere to go.
Finding the sweet spot where life is supremely simple.
Are you often haunted by a sense of uncertainty over which direction your life should go?
I know I am.
My thoughts spin their fearful tales: “Will I figure it all out or will the wheels come off?”
“Will I achieve my dreams and actualize the latent potential within me or succumb to mediocrity over time?”
Sadly, I entertain these thoughts longer then I should, but then I catch myself (Remember: you are NOT your thoughts and be careful about the “power of the spoken word”)
Thanks to the internet and how connected the world is, an endless variety of directions are available to us.
And it’s all too easy to get wrapped in thinking we SHOULD be living some other life.
For a while I was resolute that I would teach English in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Since I am a Muay Thai fighter, this was an exciting prospect for a different chapter.
Eventually, I decided against it because I did not think the teaching would be a good fit for me. The traveling to Thailand part I am still planing on.
I am still thinking about my next chapter and right now exploring writing, which feels like a better fit, since I write a lot in my current role, and this would be a tweak in a different direction that I can perhaps one day make some modest income from anywhere I choose. This is something I learned from Robert Greene where he talked about taking stock of the skills and unique knowledge that you have and seeing how you can make small tweaks to get closer and spin it toward to your ideal niche.
Though, it’s all too easy to become lost in your mind with the sheer number of options available and start stressing.
We’re all completely SATURATED with information and analysis paralysis is a common occurrence.
And living in the birth of the digital age has only poured fuel onto this fire.
For example, you ever just get caught for forty five minutes just scrolling through Netflix or Amazon to find the right movie?
So it’s all too easy to get caught up in stressing about making the right decision these days.
We’re often simply aware of TOO MUCH.
“Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities, which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality, once and forever, an immortal footprint in the sands of time.”
Victor Frankl
This is why I have embraced minimalism and think it’s an important antidote to the present times of consumerism, excess, and status games, that we’re living in.
We just need to be aware of what feels important to our well being and what naturally pulls us in its orbit. Then we just need to make a decision to follow that bread crumb trail. The rest will take care of itself.
I think there is no special perfect thing out there waiting for us and we need to stay out of our head and the spinning wheel trying to figure it out.
We are the meaning makers who color our world with what we choose and we can be good at various things. So just stay open, be curious, explore, and TAKE ACTION on what feels right. Keep it simple.
“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
Victor Frankl
You may think that where you are isn’t good enough. That whatever you think you need is still OUT THERE.
Well, yeah, maybe in some way.
But it’s possible to go through your whole life consumed with this struggle of becoming — a constant traveling away from WHAT IS to someplace where you think you SHOULD be — and never really living. Like being in a perpetual waiting station.
Here’s a mental exercise: Imagine yourself on your deathbed realizing that you squandered the entirety of your whole life trying to get somewhere rather than just expressing the music in you and just enjoying the ride. We have a chance to catch ourselves long before this day comes.
Don’t strand yourself at the station.
Know that YOU’VE ARRIVED.
Don’t let the whole of life pass you by while you wait to become [insert whatever ideal that you have in your head] in order to become happy.
Everything you need is already within you and you just need to REMEMBER.
Stop letting yourself get distracted with your thought worlds and always looking back or ahead. Instead observe yourself and your unique dilemma, let it be, and tune back into the present moment. That’s all we ever have.
“Be here now”
Ram Dass
If you look back on the periods of your life when you didn’t know if it would all work out, you can now see that it did, somehow.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Marcus Aurelius
It’s been like a decade of self improvement for me and trying to figure myself out and find a way of living and being that feels right.
I’ve explored all kinds of nooks and crannies of life — whether it was magic, candlemaking, cooking, Muay Thai, psychedelics, religion, dance, novel sexual dalliances with strangers , and more meaningful long-term relationships— and part of me feels like I’ve come a long way. Leaps and bounds from who I was ten years ago.
And another part of me feels like I haven’t changed at all. I often struggle with feeling okay and grounded in my body. Tara Brach writes in her book “Radical Acceptance”:
“As a friend of mine put it, ‘Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.’ When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.”
I often stress lament how this “thing” is still with me even after I’ve done all of this work to overcome it. But I am trying to realize that it’s okay and that I am not that feeling of perpetual striving or “personal insufficiency,” but the one who notices it. It’s just something that is part of me right now and I need to learn on being a good host.
What we really are is much deeper than our thoughts and habitual feelings of dis-ease.
When you actually experience the beautiful SIMPLICITY of what it is to slide into the Buddha/Jesus mind, you are so in tune with the present moment, and there’s nowehere to go, no one to be, nothing to do, but just to be completely absorbed where and who you are in that moment. No craving or desire for anything. Pure wholeness, joy and love for yourself and everything else around you.
I’ve only had glimpses but it’s enough to build a bridge.
That is the sweet spot where you realize how wonderful and what a gift it is to be alive. This is the default human condition.
“To the individual [in this state of mind] . . . it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment . . . is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is.
Existence not only ceases to be a problem; the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be though the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience.
Its clarity sometimes gives the sensation that the world has become transparent or luminous, and its simplicity the sensation that it is pervaded and ordered by supreme intelligence.
At the same time it is usual for the individual to feel that the whole world has become his own body, and that whatever he is has not only become, but always has been, what everything else is. It is not that he loses his identity to the point of feeling that he actually looks out through other eyes, becoming literally omniscient, but rather that his individual consciousness and existence is a point of view temporarily adopted by something immeasurably greater than himself.
The central core of the existence seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.”
-Alan Watts, This Is It
Thank you for reading.
