Strength is expressing your feelings, not burying them.
Strength is acknowledging hurt, not deflecting or hurting back.
Strength is empathy, not possession.
Strength is gentleness, not aggression.
Strength is encouragement, not intimidation.
Strength is sharing privilege, not accumulating it.
Strength is authenticity, not validation.
Strength is vulnerability, not status.
Strength comes from your heart, not your muscle.
Tasting Passion
Passion comes in two primary flavours:
- ambition, the self-serving kind that spawns cravings, expectations, and isolation
- compassion, the selfless kind that builds connection and brings happiness.
Like most things, it has two poles, and a wide spectrum in-between. Both poles pull you and provide motivation, but build different outcomes.
Lens of Reality
Belief is the most powerful force in our lives, because it shapes our reality. It influences how we see the world, others, ourselves. We give our independance and authority to someone else because we believe they know better. We let religions, corporations, and governments indocternate us with their interests because we believe they mean to do well for us. Belief is so profoundly immersive that we rarely register when these “well-intended” iterests become crusades, exploitation, and nationalism. The abnormal become the norm because we let them, because we believe in the potential of an authority’s planted seed. And when it sprouts, it entangles us, intoxicates us, and assimilates us. A new, poorer reality, one painted by dependence and insecurity, is born, and we live it. We become trapped in it.
Guard your beliefs and you will preserve authority over your own life. Make symbiotic connections with others but don’t let their labels, titles, or charisma influence who you become. Authenticity empowers us, and societies, by bringing an individual out of a number. By embracing uniqueness over conformation, we embrace inventiveness, empathy, and stronger bonds between each other and the planet.
Shift your beliefs and you will shift your reality. Shift your beliefs and you will lift your self-imposed limitations.
Daring over Good
Don’t be content with being good in what you do – it is limiting, and just another form of seeking validation. Be daring instead.
Humorous Permission
We seem to be most authentic when wrapping information we wish to communicate in humour. It can be a thought-out joke, or a haha or an emoji appended to an end of a pseudo-serious sentence, but ultimately there is some sort of truth or genuine feeling being communicated. Humour gives us permission to be honest and vulnerable, because it incorporates an insurance policy. If the information wrapped in a joke becomes too serious or offensive, we can always claim we were trying to be funny.
Keys to Life
There have been many times where I’ve achieved much but still felt unfulfilled. The objective was reached, but the journey of pursuing that objective stopped. After several deeper, vulnerable conversations with my heart, I’ve realized that the process of living is like life – it needs to evolve. To unlock and sustain that evolution – the life itself – living needs new gates opened. New pastures to explore, graze, grow upon, play in, and add to. Three such gate keys are:
- Insistence on continually challenging and breaking established and forming habits
- Protecting the present moment by defending it from rumination (being possessed by memories) and excessive sentimentality
- Backing up thought with action (manifesting life)
Further reflection led to the realization that the gates these three keys unlock are interconnected, like gears of some life-stopping mechanism. They each remove the living aspect of life, making it static (less alive). Through practice, I’ve discovered that you don’t have to unlock all three simultaneously to enjoy a more fulfilling life. If you unlock any one of them, the other two are less effective at confining you, making the total escape easier and self-fulfilling.
Pathos of Ownership
To own is to suffer. To own is to grasp and crave, endlessly, unceasingly. Ownership is attachment, a practice that is widespread, and oftentimes, pathologically encouraged. To obsessively accumulate until we are bogged down, physically and mentally, in the futile pursuit of security and validation. The idea of ownership is a human construct, though perhaps a more accurate word is man-made, considering modern civilization was built on an unbalanced, testosterone-directed patriarchy. On the most basic level, ownership is a form of aggression, a fruitless conquest of an insecure ego over material.
The compulsion of ownership is self-perpetuating, since you cannot truly own anything, not permanently anyways. If you cannot own a moment, an essential unit of time and space, you cannot own anything material borne out of it either. Like all moments, material things pass. Intuitively, we know this, but instead of continuing to move forward, taking as much as we need, we obsess over our future security. We start hoarding things, en masse. We start measuring and comparing each other on how much we’ve accumulated, and take pride in owning more – or shame in owning less.
Ultimately, the mechanism of ownership reaches a point where its internal relationship inverses. Our imagined security becomes so dependant on the idea of accumulation that the things we think we own now own us. They consume us and run our thoughts, actions, and ultimately, lives.
You don’t need to own something to benefit from it. Enduring societies and ecosystems are built on networks of sharing, not hoarding. Your own body exists, and thrives, because trillions of its cells are reciprocating. And when they are not, you get sick.
Democracy: Promise & Practice
The concept of democracy is a noble one, but I don’t think we’ve evolved or matured enough to implement it within our society. Greed and self-interest still rule nations, from political parties to influential individuals alike. These privileged groups put their needs ahead of the people, try hard to coerce us to see their selfish plight, with the real objective of getting our votes. Oftentimes, they rely on the tried and tested methods of fear-mongering, which produces the desired effect of dependence. From religions to governments, they want us to see them as our salvation, and all they ask for is our voice. So choosing governance in many so-called democratic nations is less about what people want and more about what interest groups want, with the help of an indoctrinated population. This swings left and right depending on how successful indoctrination campaigns are. There have been monarchs who held a closer ear to people’s needs than many political parties nowadays, in part because they could not lose their power. The envisioned concept of democracy does not revolve around gaining and accumulating power, but sharing it. We’ve made strides towards that promise since the Age of Enlightenment, but perhaps we can accelerate it by removing ideological and purely intellectual labels that ultimately divide us. We are not just liberals, conservatives, libertarians – we are a bit of everything in different proportions. We are unique but complete individuals with innate common values. Values like independence, compassion, empathy, collaboration, and insatiable desire for strong, symbiotic social bonds. Values that seek to connect people, and not condition them into political fodder for the privileged few.
Moment’s Freedom
Excessive indulgence in memory, and its offspring, anticipation, entraps and attaches you to time. Letting go of them, even fleetingly, propels you into the infinite space of a moment – the timeless and absolute reality. This vast, potentiating dimension is life in motion. It is a liberating feeling encompassing your breath, your presence, connection to everyone, and all that surrounds you.
Choose to Act
Fantasizing and daydreaming stem from overthinking and not doing, not expressing your feelings, intuitions, or natural desires. Once you understand what is on your mind or in your heart (usually the two are connected), choose to act. Embrace the discomfort, and shyness, fear, and pre-judgement will blow away. You will feel filled with life, nurtured by the fullness of a moment, with no projections, no expectations – and no disappointments. Choose to experience life and your natural role in it, for what they are, not for what you imagine them to be.