Turning the World Off To Discover
Even in a town as small as Wudang, life finds a way to become busy. Noisy. Unfocused in that particular way that has nothing to do with how much is actually happening and everything to do with how much noise people bring with them. Today was that day — the made-up urgency of small problems and smaller dramas filling the spaces that should have been left clean and quiet.
It's not that I don't care. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But I have learned, slowly and through no small amount of trial, how much of myself to invest — and where. Looking back at the distance I have travelled to arrive at that understanding, it still feels strange to hold it. A good strange. The kind you grow comfortable with gradually, like a new way of standing that eventually stops feeling unfamiliar.
I feel selfish right now, and I know I am not. I feel happy, and it is tinged with sadness. I am alive in the way that only feels fully true when you allow both sides of it — the yin and the yang held together, not resolved, not balanced into something neutral, but present simultaneously, each one making the other more vivid. Beautiful and painful in the same breath. Different stages of the same cycle. Like nature itself — never finished, never still, always in the process of becoming something slightly different from what it just was.
And underneath all of it, the quiet certainty that there is more. Far more than my limited mind can currently reach. That thought is both exciting and frightening, sometimes within the same moment. But I know I need to understand what I am feeling far more deeply than I currently do — and there is only one way to find that.
Tomorrow I am turning the world off. A day of silence. The only conversation will be with my deepest self, and I am genuinely curious what arises when everything else goes quiet — what surfaces, what speaks, what has been waiting patiently beneath the noise for the right conditions to be heard.
Something has changed recently. I can feel it clearly, even if I can't yet name it. But I also know that what I can feel is only the surface of what is waiting. And to find what lies beneath, there is only one path — and it runs inward.
Tomorrow I begin. As always, I have no idea where it ends. For me, that has always been the whole point.
See you on Monday.
It is not every day the words dry up like a river starved of rain.
But today they have — or something close to it. Today I feel the quiet ache of losing something. Not all at once, not dramatically, but in the way things shift when a friendship changes direction rather than ends. Something that had become close and present and real — an expressive outlet, a trusted ear that listened without judgement, understood without needing everything explained, and offered not what was wanted but exactly what was needed.
I miss these friends. I always will. And as each one moves on, I find myself learning something a little deeper about my own nature — arriving, again, at the understanding that in the end I will be the only constant companion I have ever truly had. Which is not a sad thought, not entirely. It is simply true, and it is true for all of us. I just choose to give it words. To let the words become feelings, and the feelings become something I can sit with honestly.
Because without feelings — all of them, the beautiful and the painful and the quietly indifferent — I would not be fully alive. And although they hurt sometimes, more than I always let on, I would not trade them for any other fortune.
Not one.