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.
More Essays
How We Get Up Matters
We’re fixated on growth, but growth isn’t maturity. This is about what actually happens when we fall and what it costs to get back up as the soul instead of the ego.
So Many Sources, So Little Relief
Life is always calling us. It tells us plainly, this is what we are to do and this is where we are to go. It’s an invisible pipeline between us and the energy of our soul that we’re born with.
The Mind Turns on the Passive
We only work on problems we believe have a solution. Everything else — precedent, other people’s opinions, the weight of “it can’t be done” — is a story the mind tells itself to stop looking. This is what happens when it starts looking again, and what happens when it doesn’t.
The Gap Between Us and Everything
There’s a gap most of us maintain without noticing, between ourselves and the universal energy running under everything. We call it being realistic. We call it caution. Passion is the one thing that actually closes it, and resignation is not the same as peace.
Ok. So now what?
Let the mistake be just that — a mistake. Not an omen, not an albatross. What comes next is a question of fact, not feeling.
Silly, Self-Centered. That’s Us.
We got the stuff and the people, and it didn’t satisfy, didn’t soothe. Aggravated, in fact. What makes us childishly happy isn’t too hard to come by.