How often, when you meet your friends, do you find yourself tense in the shoulders? How often do you find yourself talking over the person next to you before they’ve finished their points? How often do you feel anxious? Perhaps the true mark of friendship is the removal of the mask. It is the ability to sit in silence, comfortably, without the need to fill the empty spaces.
There is a undercurrent to these interactions; a buzz. Best to listen to it to see if you’re in the right room.
At some point, after being secured in, and after the ride begins to grind forward, you begin climbing and climbing. Your body clenches, and your brain fires and fires. You perceive what’s coming, even if this is the first time you’ve gotten on this ride. At the top, a pause, and then, plummeting and plummeting. At some point along the ascent, you are giddy, because you recognize that you have lost all control of your surroundings and what comes next. The exhilarating part is the part where you part your arms up on the way down. It is in the surrender that you feel most present; alive.
Often misunderstood as good or bad, fear is hardwired and primal to our species. We do not “get past” fear, as if it’s a marker in the sand, outside of us. We, ourselves, dictate where and what fear is. When we “push past” fear, all we’re doing is moving that marker in ourselves. When we give a speech in front of a large group, skydive, quit our jobs, marry someone, or cross a busy street, what we’re doing is redefining where the marker is, or if there really is any reason for a marker at all. We are ecstatic when we do a thing we’re fearful of, because a small, quiet part inside us realizes it was never supposed to be there to begin with. We reassess what our minds are capable of, and we feel agency over our own thoughts. Fear allows you this victory. This clarity of control. This is why we “embrace” fear; we grant ourselves the understanding that we have more power than we ever thought possible.
The focus on chasing happiness, often at all costs, disguises the ability to find contentment right where you are. Right now. We believe (we are told to believe) that happiness is somewhere else. Far, but not too far. Perceptible but slightly out of reach. To find it, one must chase it. But contentment, silent contentment, meets us right where we are. It tells us to slow down. To receive. To acknowledge the beauty of the present. That it asks us only to sit still for a moment is the very reason we want nothing to do with it. We disavow it because of its availability. Instead, we scamper about. Living in the future while forgetting the present. We should re-calibrate.
For generations, civilization had no choice but to swim in risk. It would injure and kill and also propel. Scientific discoveries, full throat-ed capitalism; it was and is a part of a DNA. What do you lose when you spend most of your time eliminating risk? To over analyze each decision is to swim breathlessly to the shores of safety, wherever that is. When you spend all of your time de-risking, you attempt to control the uncontrollable future, rather than riding it. You stymie your own inner compass; you retard growth embedded in your very DNA. Instead of de-risking decision making, one would do better by just closing their eyes and taking steps forward. And then another. And then another.
How do wolves sense prey from miles and miles away? How do birds know where to fly when the weather cools? There is an undercurrent of knowledge that sits below consciousness. We grant it a mystical quality because it’s not immediately available to us. It sits latent, in equilibrium. It’s sand through our fingers but sand nevertheless. When we manifest something, we suspect it’s something like a witch’s brew, but really it’s been there all along. We strip, instead of add. We focus and eliminate doubt, freeing it to surface. It’s quite impossible to accurately describe or predict, but tell me you doubt it’s there. You don’t. You somehow know. Feeling is enough.
We often set goals without exploring why they are our goals in the first place. “My goal is to buy a huge house” is a common one, though one can desire this huge house because of some other, deeper desire, having nothing to do with the house itself. You may want a huge house because it’s a clear sign to an insecure younger self that they’ve become successful, and thereby they matter to people that paid them no attention. “I want to run a marathon” may be a goal that results from only feeling like your true self when you strain what you believe you’re capable of. A fear of sitting still. A fear of death.
To distill the true nature of goal setting, ask yourself why. Why is this my goal? When you answer that question, ask why again, and finally a third time. Get as deep as you can. Understand the reasoning behind the goal, and understand yourself much more in the process.
We await things that are to come. Vacations. Wealth. Time off. Love. Freedom. We push them out into some far away land, just at the tip of mind’s horizon. We willingly sacrifice the present and overlay it with a mirage of the future. We take what we believe are guaranteed steps towards a not quite inevitable, but probable, place in time a little beyond now. We scream when life shows us how little control we have. Every lesson from the dying is the same: you only have now.
Using the external to fill the internal never works because you cannot feed feelings. “More” silences the ego for a moment, but it quickly returns to ask why you don’t have more, and why you’re not good enough to get it. Comparing yourself to others fills you with shame, instead of gleeful abundance.
Instead, we must ask ourselves what it is we’re seeking with more. What we’re missing now with “enough” and what makes us think that once we cross the bridge to “enough”, we wont find ourselves in the same place we are now. “More” is a symptom. Enough is a balm.
People have met face to face for thousands of years. It’s why our minds can detect small changes in someone’s expression to denote a feeling or predict action. Recently, we’ve convinced ourselves that face to face interaction can be supplemented or even replaced by video calls. We quickly and correctly began to realize how much more difficult it was to “read” someone across a computer screen. If we want to make an impression, have an impact, close a deal, have a difficult conversation, make a change, best to defer to what we’ve always done. Meet. In vibrant reality.