Lately, I’ve been focusing on being more simple, more grounded. I’ve been trying to move slowly, to be deliberate in everything I do, to take my time and to be more concerned with my life being meaningful rather than just productive.
This can be hard for me, but luckily my very body is unable to move quickly as of late, as if my entire being is resisting running anymore. I just want to be still, to listen, to observe. It takes silence to understand your truth.
Sometimes, if I’m slow and if I’m quiet enough, walking in nature, I feel as though I’m being embraced by some kind of warm, divine energy. It’s as if you’re perpetually walking in the gentle afternoon sun. It’s warm, but not hot, it’s gentle, but it’s powerful. And sometimes, when I’m walking in nature, real bliss overtakes me. I feel so connected to everything, I feel so carried, so….protected.
For me, this is very new. For most of my life, I have faced endless situations of having to be strong because there was no one there to help me or protect me. I guess, in many ways, I have for a very long time felt as though I have nothing and no one at all to lean on. And being in this mode of survival made me lock up my sensitivity, my vulnerability. I didn’t have the strength or the patience to be open with anyone. Because I didn’t have the strength to be hurt.
My sole purpose was preserving my wholesomeness, staying in a little cocoon where no one could reach me. Slowly, this began to fade away and there was a voice inside me that kept whispering to be let out. It was so gentle, but yet so persistent. I felt the need to speak my truth, but not in fear - as I would usually do - rather, with the firm belief that I might be understood. By someone. Even just by one.
I didn’t share a lot of what I do and think with people for a very long time for the simple reason that I was sure that no one would understand. I was so concerned with being judged that I agreed to suffocate my own voice for the sake of ambition.
I didn’t want to say what I experience, my struggles, my thoughts for fear that this would affect how people saw me and would prevent me from ever achieving anything in this lifetime. But I have realised that in so many ways, our modern ambitions are deeply inhuman. Wealth, recognition, fame. They are all around us on every corner, but they do us no good. It is a golden cage of suffocation. An imposed ideal of success.
I was so confused by these ideals - I began writing music as a way of speaking my innermost thoughts and yet …when it came to becoming “professional”, I felt the pressure to change in order to adjust to a “market.” Business course after business course seemingly tell you what to do.
I really tried to follow them. But at some point, you just begin to break down. My creativity was suffocated while I was trying to follow a little formula created for me. I craved sitting in stillness under a tree. I craved simplicity. I craved beauty, true beauty. I craved something real. I craved human connection.
I have sent all my ambitions to hell. My goal today is to live each day with faith, with kindness and gentleness, with conviction and with the sole aspiration of fulfilment. I am no longer attached to the measure of my "success." I am more concerned with the depth.
I crave so deeply to live simply, not to let petty concerns and details get in my way. I just want to live as a human being who breathes freely on this earth. And to always remember that my life is mine to create. Not a well orchestrated trajectory within a pre-defined framework.
I believe modernity has lost its ability to surrender. We're all too busy forging modern successes and modern careers, and yet how little time we spend in levity. Recognition and richness of character have very little to do with one another. For the past two weeks, I have been deconstructing and reconstructing what joy means to me. At the moment, I have stopped trying to achieve joy and have tried to live in it instead. And let me tell you, there is a beauty in wanting nothing. In demanding nothing. That's when you realise that you have everything.
So I would like to let life surprise me. Just a little. I would like to live in a way that fulfils me, not in a way that is defined as something. I have defined myself for so long that my soul can barely breathe.
For a split second, I would just like to let go and reach for nothing to hold on to.
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