Hi,
Before we dive in, I need to ask you for a little bit of help. I am interested in doing live speaking events, which would be an opportunity to meet many of you, read unreleased essays to a live audience and speak more in-depth on finding meaning through creativity, self-expression and storytelling in our ever-changing world.
I’d love to hear from you if:
You work at a company or institution that receives live speakers.
You have experience producing live events for authors (I could use some help coordinating all of this!)
You’d be interested in attending an event like this.
This is still an idea that is not yet fully developed but I figured I’d put out a call to the world and see what happens.
Thanks!!
Btw, I wrote this listening to this.
The way I see this life — my life — is as a long, slow, stumbling journey down a winding and very poorly lit path. Except it’s not even a path, there’s no clear path there at all. The reality is far more confusing and disorienting, I feel like I am walking into a yawning expanse and I can barely see. I keep running into things, banging my head on stuff. I can just about make out where next to place my foot, but nothing beyond that. I’m clumsy and fearful, both of the danger that lurks but far more often of the mere potential for danger.
Sometimes I move quickly, sometimes I move very slowly but I never stand fully still because I am propelled by something: a curiosity, a deep, deep yearning.
Where am I going? I can’t really answer that in a normal way because it’s not a geographic place. There’s just this feeling that I have. It feels like I’m working my way back to something, back somewhere, somewhere I’ve been before, a place I forgot so long ago that I actually forgot that I forgot… and yet something within me never fully forgot, because it feels familiar.
It’s actually not just that it feels familiar, it feels like the only thing that’s real, which is exactly how I’ve felt while on psychedelics or stepping out of a sauna about to pass out and plunging straight into cold water. I felt it standing on a balcony in Crete one January evening, watching the people stroll across the plaza below me, the waves crashing under the glint of the moon.
The ancient Greeks had two concepts of time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, which is what we usually think of as time, it is what you can measure (seconds, days, decades). What is time if it isn’t that? A friend of mine described Kairos, the other kind of time, as poetic time.
What I’m attempting to describe — crudely, poorly and clumsily — is a second interpretation of life, a more poetic interpretation of reality. It is the wisdom that Nature seems to possess. I’m talking about the feeling of light expansiveness you feel when you just did something really brave, when you wept with abandon. It is the thing that sits just behind every word that is uttered, every word that isn’t uttered, every moment of every one of our lives. The Truth that we all forget. I don’t know much about it other than I can feel it make my heart sing.
I write because it feels like it helps me remember. Sometimes I worry that I repeat myself, always talking about this bigger Thing, this Truth that I feel that is somehow in everything and also somehow impossible to touch or pin down. And yet it is the reason I feel compelled to continue stumbling forward in the darkness.
I keep writing because writing is about finding 1,000 ways to say the same thing, over and over again: the Truth of why we’re here and what we’re doing. That is the only thing there is to write about. It’s the only thing there is.
Sometimes, in the midst of all of the doubts and uncertainties and general sense of chaos that comes with life, I can begin to wonder what it’s all for. What’s the point?
All I have to do is bring my focus back to that, back to this Truth, and the many worries I have — about making or losing money, about finding love, about being safe, about figuring out who I am, about what I’m supposed to be doing — fade to the background. I remember that I don’t have to think my way through the darkness. That was never going to work in the first place.
If you feel lost, confused, unsure of why you’re doing what you’re doing, all you have to do is remind yourself of the Truth.
Consider upgrading to the paid tier to get access to weekly voice notes from me, monthly zoom hangouts with cool people from around the world, or if you just want to help me write more often.
I can totally relate and some days I feel completely unsettled with what feels like a need to go “somewhere” but I think it is an innate sense of seeking out “something”
I like the authenticity you shared today. Nobody knows , when you think you know you find out it was not 100% true ... we all live this experiment this misterious and poetic life. The people, their beliefs, the body we will go with through all of this experiment, chaos (whatever this means for any of us) , sparks of happiness, silence, loneliness ... All of it brings some clarity on who we are,where we came from not at once, many things must be repeated, be experienced many times in so many different but so similar forms after all for the answers we found to be integrated to go one level deeper o higher...One thing that I believe in for sure is that curiosity keeps you alive especially the one that helps you understand and cross the darkest moments of our life. Where are we going? To so many places...