The Summer celebratory season is the time to enjoy friends and family, and it is the time to escape. Christmas, New Year, school holidays, work break, all good reasons to shut down and get out.
Which, this year, we did. A Christmas house party. A beach camping escape. Friends over for rambling afternoon-long conversations. Luxurious expanses of time to just sit and wander the caverns of the mind, poking around in the detritus that has built up in oft-overlooked corners.
A time to let the stirred up waters settle and see what really matters.
It was revealing.
I learned that I had been torturing myself with low level anxiety for weeks and months in the lead up to the party and camping. I realised I don’t do too well with the uncertainty of how things might turn out. Now that I see this, I can not give myself over to the anxiety.
I learned that I don’t much miss the news, and certainly don’t miss the news regarding covid. Fear surrounds covid. Fear of mayhem, death and destruction, either from the virus, or from the government. It all boils down to a fear of death and dissolution. I feel more reconciled with death after this break. I do not subscribe to the fear.
I learned that I’m no longer particularly convinced about a career in Web3 / cryptocurrency. It is terribly American focused, right down to the mundane details and assumptions, and likely a lot of froth. I realised that I am settling into a man who needs substance. Perhaps substance will come through this digital world, but I’m less convinced than I was.
I learned that I’m wary of futurists, indeed anyone who can claim to have sufficient knowledge of the world to design a better one. It seems that society believes it knows most of what there is to know about the world, and the residual is unimportant for decision making. I think that’s exactly wrong, and that we actually know a minuscule amount about the world, and certainly don’t know the important things. We create our own hardship through our hubris.
I learned that I’m not that much interested in the sound and fury of social media. I was without it for weeks and did not miss it. I have limited accounts and will keep them, but will likely change how I use them. Whilst there are (generally) real people behind social media accounts, the interactions, motivations and outcomes are not real.
I learned that I have good people around me, in the real world. The world of flesh and blood, head thrown back laughter and tears of grief and joy. These people are neither assured nor replaceable, and their presence deserves loving attention.
I learned that, whilst I love to create, I have no burning desire to convert creation into action. I am happy to be all talk at the moment, unapologetically writing hollow and hopefully beautiful words.
I learned that I really like four wheel driving. That was an unexpected revelation, because I’d long held disdain for people ripping through the environment in a steel machine. Far less savage to savour nature’s delights on foot or perhaps horseback, and yet negotiating tricky sand trails and beach driving and crawling over rock is so much fun!
I had hoped to gain some clarity regarding purpose over the break. Clarity on what I should be doing with the bright and fragile life gifted me. That clarity did not come to me, and certainly not as a bolt of insight. As I write here, however, I get the impression that this purpose may be emerging through the very act of writing.
I sense that there is value, true value, in the long and slow journey of building lasting relationships with the people around me. Relationships built on trust and reciprocity. The power and importance of small gifts of communion.
To get there requires a release of any sort of goal. This is not a world that is analysed, understood, path forward designed and then the masses mobilised. That was the mistake of the covid response and, as I’m realising now in hindsight, the mistake behind ineffectual climate mitigation responses. Both presumed to know, both failed for their lack of nuanced understanding.
Rather than goals, we can only pursue illumination of ourselves and others through the light of our relationships with each other. This illumination, in turn, enables us to understand how we might proceed together. The smallest possible steps to reflect the extreme lack of knowledge available to each of us in anything except the simplest of circumstances. Small steps, taken together, illuminating the way into the next steps.
There is no salvation without internal transformation. We save the world by understanding that we will perish. That the world will perish until we become the spiritual embodiment of unfolding perfection we were always meant to be. To express it another way, the task is not to save the world. It is to heal our relationship with our mortal selves and thus with the world.
And so we return to our spiritual essence.
This world turns on relationships, transforming, unfolding, enfolding. For too long I have favoured a form of individual, ascetic intellectualism, and am not good at nurturing relationships. Learning to nurture relationships is the most important thing to learn.
Learning to enjoy life is the second most important thing. There is wonder and beauty all around us, and this only dims when circumstances don’t align with how we think they should be. We conceal our own light through expectations not met. I have long railed at life. The solution is not to bemoan life, or to search harder. The solution is to “chop wood, carry water”. Get on with living the best life given the materials before you.
We return.
We return to ourselves. Perfectly imperfect, a work complete and yet also in progress.
We return to awareness. Of what matters, of the large stones that settle out and the clay that remain behind to cloud the waters.
We return to peace, we return to tranquillity, we return to life that is as glorious as we let it become.
We return.