We’re fixated on growth, but only in the name of image and assets. The tunnel vision keeps us buying the products and giving away the attention that keeps growth just far enough out of reach to hold us. To get what we’re really after, the security and freedom we think those things will give us, we would do better to mature. It’s more about roots than leaves.
Maturation asks much more of us than whether to cold plunge or not to cold plunge. Questions our souls have to get behind and push uphill, like how do we live in this world with all our doubts and despair? Why do we have to fall so far? And how, exactly, do we get up?
The compulsions and breakdowns are the ego fighting the truth. What isn’t working for us is the soul’s shove up against the wall. We feel it when success stops feeling like relief. Maturing lets us live into an image of a life that’s not force-fed to us but emanates from us. The stakes are higher than what’s good for me, and me alone, right here, right now. In the matter of the ego versus the soul, it’s kill or be killed.
Destiny is a whisper. It gives our heart something to attach to rather than making it a prisoner. It has no patience for greed, lust, thievery. It demands humility instead.
The world is predictable in its empty promises: sex, money, lovers, permanence, superiority. To serve the image we’re chasing, we have to give up what should satisfy in favor of what does. There isn’t time for contortions. It works, or it doesn’t. Our unease is a symptom of a trade-off we’re forcing—evidence that we’re going the wrong way, down instead of up—all this sabotage for fear of heights. For fear of being alone there.
We have to learn to turn loneliness, physical and ideological, into steel. Sometimes we need the empty room. And there are times the ideological costs us something. Neither is punishment. It’s the toll our calling charges for listening to it instead of the crowd. We pay it by carrying on anyway, lonely or not. The ego wants company. The soul is connected.
How we fall teaches us who and where we are. We get back up by paying attention to what the fall taught us. Here’s what didn’t work. Getting up is how we answer the call to acceptance, to admitting we have to walk. A call to living where our soul is most free and we are most responsible. Getting up is turning to face the height we sabotaged ourselves away from, and climbing it anyway. Not as the ego. As the soul.
Quote
I would have felt myself dying if this dream had been taken away from me by reason. Not by authority, not by destiny.
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Don’t Change a Thing (Except You)
When things really are that bad, our first instinct is to find out who did this and tell it a thousand times. But nothing out there needs to change. The pivot happens in the mind, the only place from which we can change.
Wait. Don’t hang up. Listen.
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Tick. Tock. And you don’t stop.
There’s no strategy that wins this game. There’s only the choice to stop playing.
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Exist. And don’t apologize for it.
We’ve built an economy out of our own existence — guilt as currency, martyrdom as proof we’re good, self-punishment as payment. But there is no debt, and peace is available.