It’s all energy. Vitality for the taking. Spirit for the basking. Love for the receiving. The universe is potent and plump, available to us. Forever batting its eyelashes, pointing us toward what it wants to give us. The material world can’t compete. It’s plastic, defined only by how it reacts.
Most days we don’t feel any of this. We move through rooms, answer messages, keep appointments, and call it a life. The current runs the whole time — under the traffic, under the small talk, under the tasks we check off to prove we’re productive.
We reach for it when we’re forced to, when we’re outmatched by the challenge at hand, when we’re committed past the point of retreat, or when we’re attempting to engage with someone’s soul rather than their surface. We drop the boundary between us and the creation, the problem, or the person. We notice our own guarding and let it fall. We trade separation and control for the current that connects us to universal power.
Rational and practical decisions don’t channel anything. There’s nothing to work with. Huge risks, driven by passion, are what collapse the wall between us and nature. Life force moves and creates through us if we let it. We have to trust it more than we trust our egos. Give in to the wave. Kneel to it. Participate rather than consume.
Not everything that feels like surrender is surrender. Compulsion wears the same face, reaching that never satisfies, repetition mistaken for devotion. Resignation wears it too, dressed as acceptance: we stop trying and call it fate. Neither collapses the wall between us and real power. Both are the wall, wearing the costume of letting go.
There is a specific creation trying to manifest through us, and only us. We recognize this feeling before we have a name for it, the thing returned to for years, worked on with no proof it matters, because stopping costs more than continuing. We can block it out of fear of its power or failure, but we pay for going against our own nature.
We have free will. We can act against nature, the ant against the elephant, and spend a life getting stomped for it. Channel it or resist it: those are the only options, and resisting costs more and hurts longer. What we resist doesn’t just cost us. It costs the world the thing that was trying to come through.
Look around at what surrounds us, the buildings, the systems, the entire built world. Almost none of it is obedience. Most of it is the safe version of an idea that had a truer one underneath. We are surrounded by what people made instead of what was trying to be made.
Life isn’t only about fine-tuning a persona. It’s about opening to fate, to our destiny. Playing from our hearts. Becoming the artist, and letting the maker make of us whatever it wants.
Quote
Modern man is still anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)
Song Accompaniment
More Essays
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.
How We Fail the Same Way. Twice. Again.
It’s not the magnitude of the situation that stops us. It’s whether we allow ignorance to strip us of the will to stand back up — and how we keep choosing not to look.
What We Run From Chases
Our feelings are omnipresent helpers trying to save us from something far more dangerous than discomfort. The dogs are always circling. It’s the running that makes them ferocious.
Staying the Same Has Consequences
Nothing makes us feel quite as comfortable as staying right where we are. We become masters of our quarter acre, loyal to identities we have outgrown. Yet another life keeps knocking.
