On Being Sculpted By Time

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

If you were a prospective piece of art and could choose your creator, who would you choose? Which cosmic force or element would you elect to be shaped by? Who do you trust to mould you, to sculpt you, to remove all that is excess until you are just exactly as you are meant to be?

For me, time has always been something that evoked quite a bit of anxiety and an equal amount of curiosity. Its slipperiness fascinated me. It moves, but you cannot really see it move except through what it touches and it touches absolutely everything. Both living and non-living. Both people and chairs. You see it wear youth into old age and tear new objects into precious antiques. Time, to me, feels like an artist. But not just any kind of artist. A sculptor. One that erodes things into being. One that carves itself onto our skin, creating stories where there was space, making lines on our surface in much the same way the wind chips away at the earth, sometimes making sharp surfaces we call mountains and at other times making space between those very mountains for water to flow and life to flourish. Perhaps time is indeed a sort of atmospheric being, not dissimilar to air. Perhaps it functions as our breaths do, constantly flowing through our bodies but never remaining in it. Our bodies need time to exist; they cannot be here without it. And just like the number of breaths we experience in a single lifetime is limited, so is the number of seconds. So maybe it is worth considering how our relationship to our breath is similar to our relationship to time, and how could exploring our relationship to our breaths offer us insight into our relationship with time. Perhaps it is through our breaths that we can get to know time more intimately.

Over the past couple of years, my relationship to time has been shifting, not only in terms of the perspective from which I observe it but too in terms of the way I am engaging with it. Time from where I stand right now seems to control everything. There are certainly aspects of time that terrify me, but right now my fascination with time is winning. I am in complete awe of it. Maybe I am a little obsessed but because this feels somewhat new to me — I have decided to attempt surrendering to the control and power of time, and see what that’s like for a change. I am sure time has a lot to show us, perhaps that’s why it keeps knocking on our doors to pay attention to it. Perhaps anxiety arises when we refuse to look at time, when we resist what it is trying to show us, when we insist on keeping our eyes closed claiming it is already too dark. Though that surrender does not mean I am not participating in this relationship, in fact I would argue I am participating more. As I learn to be with time, I become its student. As I cooperate with it, I become its partner. And maybe one day when I master its language, I can become its communicator.

We often look to our skin to see the impacts of time. We often rely on visual changes reflected back to us through mirrors and photographs. And in all this looking around to see the consequences of time, we miss the point entirely, for the most powerful ways in which time sculpts us cannot be seen with the naked eye, it requires a different kind of vision. That of the naked heart. Perhaps the scratchings of time on our skin divert from the scratchings it makes on our hearts. Although painful at times, it is these very scratchings that soften us at the core, and make us kinder and more compassionate beings. With every moment lost to memory, with every current becoming past, we acquire a kind of knowing that can only be learnt through experience, and it is this very experiential learning that grants us the vision and courage to walk together into the future with our fellow human and non-human soul mates. What time teaches is invaluable, what time grants us through its lessons is a way of being in the world that is harmonious with all the rest of the ingredients that make up the world. Time invites us to flow with it instead of fight against it. Time gives us the option of either teaming up with it by accepting its ways or rejecting it by attempting to override its ways. Time gives us the choice to be in harmony with it and thus the world, or to separate from it and all that exists in harmony with it. While the former option offers peace, the latter offers war — war with ourselves, war with the world and war with existence.

Though each one of us experiences time from a very personal point of view, time is in fact not personal in and of itself, even if it feels so. It is a universal experience, one that the entire World is subject to, from every star in the universe to every cell in every organism. This universality of time reminds us that time is not mine, neither is it yours or anyone’s at all. Time cannot be possessed, saved, sold, or traded. In the same way that I can’t give you my breath, I can’t give you any of my life hours to add to yours, even if I wanted to. Time, I believe, like our breaths is something we experience because we have a body. It is part of the experience of being in a body. Without time, we cannot experience depth. Everything would just be flat, everywhere, here and there all at once. Like a painting in a way. You can see it all at the same time. But once we acquire dimensionality, we can only be in one place at one time, experiencing time as flowing, events as series happening one after the other. When we acquire dimensionality and experience time through a body, we get to experience the process by which the painting becomes itself, we get to experience every step of that process broken down in moments just like watching a film, one image at a time for thousands of seconds and thousands of images until it’s finished and the screen goes dark, and you put on another film or just lay there in silence and stillness taking in what you have just experienced.

Time, you see, is that which can be found in the space between stillness and movement, between a painting and a film, between flatness and dimensionality. When time is present, movement becomes possible. It is the movement of still images that creates the “happening now” experience that we feel as the moving of time during a film. I feel perhaps with movement and time, it might be a chicken or egg type conundrum where you cannot say which came first but certainly the presence of one gives way for the other to arrive. Sound, speech, music — they too are experiences only possible through an existence of dimensionality and depth and not possible through flatness. In a film, sound is possible; in a painting, it is not. And why is sound possible only in the presence of time? Because sound is created through vibration and what is vibration — movement. So sound, speech and music are all forms of movement that come along to remind us furthermore what our dimensionality makes possible. So when time moves, we can move, and when it stops, I suppose we die and return to stillness once again.

The next time you meditate and slow down, take note of what is still within you and what is not. You will notice that there is much that is not within our control, much that cannot be stilled but through working with our breaths, we can learn to slow things down. By learning to navigate the rhythms of our breaths, we can witness our internal clock run, our breaths flowing through our bodies like the sand in an hourglass, passing through one at a time, keeping time for us. Observing the breath can help us to better understand the experience of being moved by time. Time began for us with our first breath. The breath is the primary mover of all things, of all beings, of our entire existence. When the breath moves, it moves everything within you. Every cell, heart, limb, voice in this world is moved by the breath. The breath is the rhythm whose movement creates time. Everything breathes. Everything that experiences must breathe in its own way. And when it ceases to breathe, it ceases to move, it dies and returns to stillness.

So if it is our breath that keeps time, then how we breathe, how we move, determines our internal weather, thereby determining our relationship to time, how time feels to our bodies, what time is removing and how it removes it. So ask yourself what is your relationship to your breath? Ask yourself as a gesture to make peace with time. The time whose passing we must all confront, whether as our own bodies change or those of the people we love. Ask yourself so that you may see that time is bound too like all of us to the laws of give and take. That which time takes from us, it gives something in its stead. All the scales even out in the end, so ask yourself what has time given you. Time is so often identified as that which takes, perhaps now the time has come for Time itself to shed its identity as taker and reveal a new side of itself as — giver, redeemer, and initiator of life.

As we age and our eyes age too, the layers between us and time slowly fade away. Over the past couple of years, I have been learning a new language by which to communicate with time and understand it. This language is one that observes the movement of the stars to keep time, commonly known as — astrology. The study of astrology has transformed my relationship with time. Now I see myself not just as a part of time but as an expression of time — a beat in its song. In a way, by looking far I have come to see what is near more clearly. I have come to see that we are all not only made up of time, but are time itself expressing as individual bodies. So you could say that we are all a form of embodied time, time getting to know itself through experiencing itself in form. How wonderful, mysterious and extraordinary it all is.

With love and always for peace,

S.A. 

On Happiness: are there good and bad kinds?

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

I was flipping through a magazine recently and this self-help exercise came up. Its aim was to help you identify moments of happiness you had experienced within whatever time frame you chose to explore, be it a day, a week, or years. I guess the point of that was two-fold: first, to train yourself to recognise happiness and second, to be able to better understand what triggers those moments so you can increase them. But as I read through the exercise, I couldn’t help but wonder if this logic of identifying what made you happy and trying to increase it was limited only to certain kinds of happiness — the good kind.

I don’t really know who decides what’s good or not but surely there are kinds of happiness that are more destructive. So perhaps let us step aside from good and bad happiness and speak of it instead in terms of its usefulness to ourselves and to others around us. Maybe we can refer to happiness as being of a productive kind and a destructive kind. I never really thought of happiness before as having any sort of diversity or texture but now it makes sense why sometimes deep down I feel a certain aversion to happiness. Yes, there is the normal doubt that kicks in that wonders if I deserve this happiness and insists to base it on some sort of criteria that is commonly referred to as “goodness” although we might be all referring to wildly different criteria, we all use the common terms good and bad to grade our progress as humans in this world. For some, goodness may be based on the spiritual, for others, it may be more financial or related to marriage or having children or a successful career. The thing is it doesn’t really matter what your criteria is; what matters more is that you have one. Why is that important to identify? Because it means somewhere deep inside of you sometime long ago, you decided that you cannot be happy until …, and now fill in the … with your criteria. While having a reward system in place might be useful to help you achieve other goals in life or to teach your children the value of discipline and how to work towards something, when it comes to happiness this is one of the most cruel things we can do to ourselves. We end up delaying happiness because of some idea in our heads that happiness only belongs to people who are … . Happiness, like sadness, like anger is an emotion. It is a temporary response to a thought, to our environment (internal or external), to events (internal, external, past, present, real, assumed) and to people as well, and all these responses, these feelings we feel about things influences how we experience and perceive the world. But happiness like other emotions comes and goes. It cannot stay forever but yes we have the power to call it in by influencing the inner or outer environment it is responding to. The inside we can influence with which thoughts and feelings we choose to pay attention to. The outside we can influence by taking ourselves to places we love, eating food that helps nourish both our bodies and souls, seeing and connecting with people we love. So you see what the magazine article was trying to focus on is the aspects of bringing in happiness we can control and influence. 

Though I must say that needs to come with many buts and disclaimers because not all sources of happiness are created equal, and therefore, not all resulting happinesses are the same. Happiness that you get from winning at the casino might be more dangerous and quite destructive to try to get more of than happiness you get by having an intimate heartfelt conversation with a friend. But in fact, I would say even the spending time with friends kind of happiness if done too much that it starts to impact your progress in life elsewhere then even spending time with friends becomes now a destructive source of happiness. Hence why at the very beginning of this I asked you to put bad and good on hold and refer instead to productive and destructive because it means that we steer away from blaming anything as being the cause of less happiness but rather take back the responsibility and emphasise that it is not burgers that are themselves bad but how many burgers we have, it is not alcohol itself that is the culprit but our relationship to it, it is not our desire for beauty that is bad but rather how much money we are spending on new clothes rather than saving for a home, if saving for a home is something you’ve been saying you want to do but just haven’t gotten round to doing it yet. 

At the end of the day, there is no universal strategy to happiness. One, because we all mean different things when referring to happiness. And two, because we ourselves will mean different things when we speak of happiness now and in ten years time. We are always changing and so is the world we live in, and perhaps there is nothing more destructive than holding on to an outdated idea of happiness because after all what is a human being without their capacity to adapt, to grow and to change. Can you imagine a tree refusing to shed its leaves in the winter because it’s being stubborn and holding on to the idea that it cannot be happy without its leaves? It is absurd. So why do we humans refuse to call ourselves out and catch the absurd demands we are making of life and of ourselves? Why put all this pressure on yourself to not shed your leaves when it is winter and on top of that criticise yourself for it? Now how damaging is that to your happiness?

May we all learn to see where we asked the impossible of ourselves, where we have demanded the impossible from life, and forgive our hearts for shedding happiness during the winter. May we make together kinder spaces in our minds so we can hold the truth that much of what we do, we might not fully understand. May we all learn to just live through it all because there is a happiness to be found in all the corners of this earthly experience. Even when it is darkest, happiness sparkles throughout like the stars of the night sky shimmering and reminding us that we are always surrounded by Suns, even when our own Sun is yet to rise; the stars remind us to have faith. Faith that sooner or later, the Sun will shine again, so until then learn to enjoy the Suns you can see now, even if they are fainter and scattered. May we all learn to enjoy the sparkle of our own night sky and embrace it in all its magic! 

With love and as always for peace,

S.A.

On Freedom

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

Every body deserves to be free, to feel free, to act and communicate with freedom. But what does it mean to be free? And what is freedom without a cage, a wall, a boundary to resist? Can there be such a thing as freedom if there weren’t such a thing as restriction? What door does limitation offer freedom without which it cannot find itself? These are all questions that have been contemplated, questioned and even attempted to be answered by some of the greatest minds ever known to philosophy. And yet, it is one of those questions that’s not the task of anyone else to answer for us. Only we can authentically answer what freedom means to us — to our specific context, to our specific body and self. To define freedom is to box it into a universal that is bound to become particular once again. The search for freedom is itself the teacher of freedom. It is important when undertaking such a journey to ask ourselves what we are seeking freedom from. Is it the confines of our body, the inescapable thoughts of our mind, is it the judgment of others, or perhaps it is the judgment of God himself? It is important to ask because it is only through recognising that limitation, through acknowledging what we feel restricts us, what we feel holds us back, can we transcend those boundaries and actually find our own particular freedom by knowing what roadblocks have been placed on our path. Sometimes these blockages are of our own doing, sometimes they are the doing of people who love us, sometimes they are the doing of the world, and sometimes they are the doing of time and many other times things just are the way they are — placed by God or by us who knows either way there are restrictions we must learn to love to be able to break through them and break free of them. One such restriction might be that we cannot turn back time, we cannot stop our growing old or the passing of time through which we lose our youth, our parents and our friends. Can you imagine what it would be like to be free of change, free of being moulded by it? I can’t. I don’t think my mind has the capacity to imagine that which is truly impossible. Everything changes all the time. Even the dead change. A leaf that falls off a tree eventually morphs into the ground or finds itself carried to a body of water that will alter its form, eat it and eventually become one with it. We are all that leaf, all in a process of being eaten and merging with the world until we eventually become a Whole. But is there freedom in such a trajectory? Is there freedom in what will already be? Can there be freedom in living and dying? Is it possible to transcend that which we cannot break away from? How do we free ourselves while simultaneously rooting and belonging more deeply to life? How do we safely make the passage to freedom without jeopardising the certainty and safety of being locked in, of being held by the world? 

I have asked more questions than have given answers but such is life. It is more valuable to ask than to answer, more useful to make certain things uncertain than to make uncertain things certain for the latter is seldom possible. I am a human being whose form of prayer is to ask — not to instill doubt but to bring about faith — for faith can only truly find us in the spaces where uncertainty resides. If you know a table is solid, you don’t need to believe that it is. But if you cannot see the edges of a table, you will wonder, you will imagine and you will ask until you are brought back into the arms of faith once again. Freedom is not that different, in the sense that we cannot be certain we are free, we cannot be certain we are not — and in that space in between is where freedom lies but the key to that space is, like with faith, a question. A question that opens you up to the reality of your freedom, that allows you to live freely instead of dream freely. So ask away until there is but one question left to ask, and in that moment you might choose to ask it or you might realise that you don’t need to because you now know that you knew all along.

With love and always for peace, 

S.A. 

On the Rhythms of Friendship

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

Sometimes friends move. Sometimes you move. Sometimes they change. Sometimes you change. And very often it doesn’t happen at the same time for all of you. And so it seems that every friendship has its own rhythm. Unfolds in its own time, deepens at its own pace, but what all friendships have in common is that they are always moving, none remain in the same place forever. They travel as you travel, and explore new depths and horizons as you do. And all are bound to face a storm. Some end up parting ways and others grow tighter in the process. There are few friendships that have lived their entire lives on tropical islands, untouched by harsh winters and scorching desert suns. Some friendships age gracefully and mature into the finest of wines. Others die young. And others have yet to explore new territories with their friendship, to discover its boundaries and test its will. Some are friendships of grief, brought together by the unfortunate events of life. And the oldest kind of all are friendships of childhood. Like all other things in childhood, because we are so small, they are so large.

The friendships of childhood are one of the most important, if not the most important way we come to form relationships with people outside our family. They are how we observe interactions between others and how we learn to observe ourselves in the world. They are our first mirrors. Childhood friendships were our entry way into the world of complex human relationships. They introduced us to conflict. They taught us how to play, how to communicate, how to say sorry and how to share. Childhood friendships are the context in which we got to experience a complex range of emotions that we didn’t understand yet as children, for instance like how we can love someone so much and get so mad at them that we decide we never want to see them again, even if never was just for a moment. Childhood friendships taught us about the contradictory nature of people, of life, of our actions, of how we might feel we have the best toys and still want to have our friend’s toys too. Childhood friendships are where our humanity first expresses itself. It is where we perform our first kindest acts and our first cruellest ones. Childhood friendships can be ones we hold dear to our hearts and can be those too we never want to be reminded of. After all, they are one of the strongest connections to our past. And some portion of our past is bound to be wonderful and some bound to be traumatic, and some just bla. But unlike the past that cannot move forward with us, the people from our past can. And it is always our choice to carry them with us (whether consciously or unconsciously). It is us that decides how much of our past we keep close and how much we tuck away and kiss goodnight.

It is interesting don’t you think, this term friend-ship. A ship of friends. A ship that carries you across the river of time. From past to future. This river filled with people swimming and you the only permanent occupant of your ship bring people in from time to time, some are to entertain you, some to teach you, others so you can teach them, some are for your judgement, others will come to judge you, some will make you laugh, others will bring you sorrow, some will bully you, and others will offer you their hearts full of love. There is much we get from friendship, and there is much we give to it too. It is a relationship after all, one that takes and one that gives, and in that exchange creates bonds and connections that shape the ship we travel on through life.

To all friends, old and new, thank you.

With love and always for peace,

S.A.

On the Beauty of Conflict 

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

Recently I found myself telling a friend that I don’t really understand how someone could enjoy watching other people fight. Even though my friend agreed, something inside of me wasn’t satisfied with that response. I felt that maybe my friend and I weren’t really paying attention, maybe we weren’t seeing something important that was so clearly there, that everyone else could see. A few days later, as the thought simmered and cooked itself in my mind, an answer arrived slowly, trickling through my resistance to accept something so “aggressive”. After all, I was all about peace, so how could I let myself see that there was beauty in conflict, in war, in fighting, let alone fighting as a sport. But I couldn’t not see it. It was there showing itself so beautifully and so transparently.

I had been the kind of person that tried to avoid conflict with others. I wasn’t so confrontational, and always afraid to cause upset or to cause myself upset through another’s upset. I was hiding behind peace hoping conflict wouldn’t find me. Ironically, I was already in it but just couldn’t see it. I was refusing to see the truth that I was bathing in conflict, some of it was for fun and some was more serious forcing me to grow and move forward through life. I love stories, and conflicts are at the heart of every one of them. It’s what makes a hero out of the human in every story. It is what captivates us because we understand that conflict is how we all grow, how we mature, how we get closer to those around us, how we get closer to ourselves. It is there at the centre of it all, like a sort of gravity that pulls our lives together, connects the dots between the different lines and threads. So you see, people go to see boxing matches not because they like to see others in pain or bleed but because it is a celebration of the “fight”, the fight that we are engaged in from the moment we begin to make our way through our mother’s birth canal. It is a celebration of the force that is “opposite”; it is a celebration that duality moves us forward, that the strength of our spine comes from having to resist and grow against gravity. Watching people fight reminds us that fighting is normal. It reminds us that it is sacred, that there is pleasure to be found in the pain. 

Characters facing great obstacles and conflicts are an integral part of any captivating story. This is the stuff that makes for good TV. This is the stuff that we are willing to give our time and attention to. Why? Because it reminds us that conflict is beautiful, that what starts out one way will end somewhere else, that every conflict is a journey in and of itself, that it has an end just as it does a beginning. It reminds us that the fight is survivable, that we can do it, that we are all warriors in our own way. I understand now what I couldn’t see before because I was refusing to see the opportunities conflict was presenting in my own life. I had told myself the story that it was all harmful, that all conflict was painful, that it was all personal. Now, I can see a much bigger picture. I can appreciate the closeness I feel with someone who I am able to work through a fight with. Making space for conflict in our lives is not only important but it’s what makes it interesting. It’s what pushes us to evolve and change.

Watching a fight reminds us that there are always winners and losers, and that both are important for the growth of the other, and that being a part of the fight is what’s more important than winning or losing because one day you might be a winner and another a loser. It teaches us that there is meaning and joy to be made and had in the process, so we better not get attached to winning or losing but that it is best to learn to be both. Watching a fight reminds us that engaging in conflict is a creative act and that there is a big element of uncertainty that teaches us how to listen and be more sensitive. One of the perhaps more useful elements of watching or observing conflict is that even though it might look like chaos, but there are always rules; even wars have rules and when these rules are violated, people need to be held responsible. And different conflicts have different rules, and rules like your opponents are to be respected if you want to play the game and fight the fight. Of course, it could be argued that we see too much conflict in our world and perhaps we need to see more peace. But the thing is peace, resolution and unions all begin with conflict, they are the creative products of conflict. So perhaps the fact that there is so much conflict around us might be a sign that we are not following through till the end, that maybe we are leaving too many conflicts open-ended, unresolved and without an end which leads to long-term dysfunctional conflicts. And so like anything, conflict can be productive as well as destructive. You can choose how to manage your conflicts, you can choose to be brutal or compassionate. You can choose to prioritise immediate gains of winning the fight or long term gains of winning the relationship. You can take ownership of your mistakes or blame everyone else. Conflict is a great teacher, a beautiful one and a brutal one at times. But life is not just a walk in the park; it certainly can be sometimes but it is also the sand storms and hurricanes that turn and transform people’s lives. So today perhaps take a moment to recognise all the goodness conflict has brought to your life, recognise the muscles you have acquired through conflict, and the confidence with which you have learnt to protect your boundaries. 

May you always have it in you to fight the good fight.

With love and always for peace, 

S.A. 

On the Power of Pain

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

One of the most precious dreams you can gift yourself during a period of hardship is the possibility of a different future to the one you see now. Life at this point may have not turned out how you expected, but it is still happening, it is still moving, still becoming, and so are you. I personally cannot lie to you and say it is easy to grieve what may have been, what could’ve become, but I do know that it is much easier to hope differently than to keep on hoping for some old dream that will never be, even if that dream were us. What is us after all but what we are and we are not our imagined selves, we are who we are now. And to move anywhere forwards or even backwards, we must recognise first who are today. We get stuck when we refuse precisely to do that — to see the truth of who we are now. It is only in recognising our present that our past makes sense and our future becomes clear. We cannot walk if we cannot see the terrain on which we stand — is it rocky, is it sandy, is it a mountain top, or a river bend? It is painful, I know, to open your eyes to the truth. But when you feel the pain, only then can it subside. Only then can it be transformed into something else. So you must choose what to do with your pain. Only you can decide what to make of it. Perhaps you had no hand in the pain you find yourself in, but you do have all the power to make something of it and that something can be of your choosing, but only if you are willing to take the pain on, to stretch your arm out to it and say ‘Yes, I accept you. Yes, I feel you. Yes, I am willing to learn your lesson.’ Only then will the pain be willing to be transformed by you too.

Those who seek to accumulate power are often condemned as greedy but equally we must not forget that those who relinquish their power are refusing a precious gift given to them by the Universe. We are blessed with power but sometimes we forget how to hold this power and use it. We try to own it, to possess it and accumulate it, but we must remember that it is merely a current, a sort of electricity passing through us seeking to light us up not dissimilar to the way an electric current illuminates a light bulb. First though, we must recognise we are a light bulb. We are not the creators or owners of this power, we cannot collect it or send it away. If we try to hoard it or prevent it from coming in, we simply burn out and go dark. In either case, whether out of too much light or too little light, we die prematurely without the continuous flow of power. It is precisely this flow of power that helps us heat up, burn, and transform our pain. Just like fire burns wood into ashes that then nourish the Earth; it is our power that burns and transforms our pain into something nourishing that feeds us and all the other humans who are connected to our circuit. Without power, we do not have the energy to overcome. Without power, we cannot become who we are. We become who we are by recognising our ability to transform our suffering into something else. So suffering comes sometimes to remind us of a power we have forgotten to use — the power to transform. It comes to remind us of our heritage, our ancestral right to the beautiful art of alchemy, of making something out of nothing, of giving life to something that is dying, of transformation and resurrection. 

When there is no pain, there is no pressure. A diamond is formed through pressure. It is all earth, but with enough pressure and heat, a diamond is formed. So remind yourself, where there is no pain, there is no pressure to transform. In our current culture though, there is this fallacy that we constantly need to improve ourselves and I must admit that I too fell and still fall under the misconception sometimes that I must change to improve, that somehow my current self is not good enough and so must become better. But the truth is that there is no good enough. There is just enough. And there is change. Change is merely a movement, like walking, like swimming, like painting, it is just a new arrangement of the raw materials already present. Like baking a cake, the eggs alone are good enough to make an omelette, and the flour good enough to make bread, and both are delicious, but together they can make a cake, also delicious but just different. So perhaps the trick is not to take change so personally, that it does not signify we are second best, but that we cannot be eggs forever or flour forever, that we must connect and merge with all that is around us, that is the purpose of change, as it is with alchemy, to combine! To combine to a point of no separation where something entirely new is birthed. Isn’t that beautiful? To be with something else, to be a part of something new, to become something entirely different together. It is the process of merging, of melting into life. Pain, change, power help us melt into life so that we can become life and finally recognise ourselves as not others roaming in life but that we are life itself. Life is us happening through us, speaking and changing via us, and merging onto and with itself so that it can be as inclusive, as containing, as whole as it possibly can.

With love and always for peace, 

S.A. 

(P.s. I’ve missed you and apologies for the recent long breaks.)

On Feeling Alive 

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

When we speak of feelings, we often refer to the obvious sadness or anger or fear, but there is an important feeling from which all other feelings are born — the feeling of aliveness. And when we speak of the feeling of aliveness, a beautiful distinction is born, one that does not assume our humanity by just being here, but more importantly, by feeling we are here. We are not simply human because we exist, but because we feel we exist. It is the feeling of our here-ness, of our alive-ness, that anchors us to this life and allows us to experience it. I love the idea that our existence is not just mere fact, but rather mere experience. So what does it mean then to exist through our feelings, through our experience, instead of some fact that we are here because we were born. There are many who are born, who are indeed alive because their hearts beat, but who do not feel alive. So what is it then that makes us feel alive if it is not our being alive, and how can we access this feeling of aliveness, that is the foundation of all experience, of all feelings? 

As it is with all other feelings, it is unique to us. Yes, we may call ourselves human, group ourselves into communities, into families, into relationships through which we define ourselves, but when it comes to feelings, one can never really know if any feeling they experience is the same as the next person’s experience of that feeling. And even as best as we use language or visual imagery or music, or whatever it is we use to communicate feelings to one another, the experience of a feeling is always our own. And so, it’s no different with aliveness. So what makes you feel alive is different than what makes me feel alive. And despite that difference, we can all agree that we need to feel alive. Feeling alive, I believe, is all that we need as humans to function, to endure hardship, to experience joy and then be able to let it go. It is the experience of aliveness that I believe has been confused with happiness. Often times, people not just of our time, but of many times past, have been obsessed with the road to happiness. And I must humbly say that this might’ve been an error in either translation or judgement, because it is not happiness that we need but aliveness that we hunger for. Anyone who has been numb to their feelings can tell you that they just crave to feel anything at all, even if it is anger or fear or the more uncomfortable anxiety, but they just want to feel. Feeling, being able to feel, is what really makes us feel like we exist, it is what makes us feel human, it is what makes us feel like we are participating in life, like we are truly embodying our bodies, these beautiful structures that come to life and have meaning because we feel them and when we stop feeling through them, we are severed and separated from the experiential aspect of life, and that is in my own very humble opinion, the only aspect that confirms that we are indeed living. 

So finding our aliveness is vital. It is just as essential as food and water. It is indeed ironic that our aliveness is often brought into question when we are confronted with illness or the death of a loved one. It is when we come into contact with death that it becomes clear that we have not been living. And people try to find their aliveness in many different ways, some have more sex, others get married, some have kids, some quit their jobs, some get divorced, some decide to sell everything they own and travel the world, and others just stay put in their regular environment trying to find life within themselves. There is no formula to feeling alive, there is no one way to feel alive but there certainly is the desire among us all for life and usually when that desire for life fades, that’s when people begin to question why they are even here, what their life means, if they should continue to be alive. It is when we lose our desire to feel alive that we are truly in danger of death. It is the feeling of aliveness that keeps us alive. Again, it is not about the doing of aliveness or things that you think alive people do, but about getting into the feeling of aliveness, it is about becoming it, embodying it. Are you really feeling life? Are you really taking it in? From the smallest everyday things like your cup of coffee or the frustration you feel in traffic to the breeze caressing your skin to the larger joys of graduating or falling in love or to the heart-wrenching grief you feel when a loved one dies. All of this is feeling. And if we stop ourselves from feeling all that we can feel, this is how we disconnect from feeling alive. We often think aliveness is something we have to travel to, to find in sports or exciting things, but aliveness is much simpler, it is with us and within us, it is in the very core of us, always trying to express itself through us, but unfortunately for us, there is much that we confront in life sometimes that causes us to shut the door on our feelings, on the very thing that allows us to experience life. It is unfortunate but it is understandable. I, myself, have been there. In some ways, I still am trying to find my way back to aliveness. It is no easy task to journey back to that which one has forgotten. How do we remind ourselves of that which we do not remember? And re-membering is not an act that solely brings us back together with our pasts. I believe re–membering is an act that too brings us forward to our futures and reunites not only our present to the future but our past to the future. And so one’s ability to remember is vital to this process of re-unification with self and with time. Remembering is what brings the flow back into our lives. And feelings need us to be in flow for them to flow through us. So how can one harness then their ability to remember in order to harness their ability to feel?

I think one of the most powerful ways to remember that which has passed or that which is still to come in the future is to imagine it. Our memories of our past are largely imagined, and so are our visions of the future. And so if our ability to imagine informs our ability to remember, then it seems that our ability to imagine is deeply connected with our ability to experience our lives. So if our ability to imagine is behind our ability to experience then could our imagination be in fact all we need to experience our lives and thus feel them? Our ability to imagine gives birth to our ability to hope, to believe, to re-ignite our passions and create the life we would like to experience. Our ability to imagine a different life is what allows us to break down and disassemble the life we want to move away from experiencing. Not only does imagining help us move through life, but the freedom to imagine is itself at the cornerstone of feeling alive. And it has nothing at all to do with your perception of yourself as a creative person or not. It simply is your birthright as is feeling alive. We all need to imagine just like we all need to breathe. Our ability to envision, to see what is not yet physically here, allows us to feel like we are participating in life. And what is feeling alive if not feeling like you are participating in the creation of life. I would like to emphasise that imagination is not a mind activity, it is a whole body activity. It is the bringing on of a feeling but through other means like thinking or envisioning narratives or listening to music, and what these narratives do is help us call in our feelings. And it is these feelings that we have called in through the act of imagining that themselves help anchor that which we have imagined into our lives. So if you can imagine something, that is if you can feel something, you begin to recognise not only that it exists but that it is possible, and you can begin to gage your comfort with that feeling and thus how open you are to that feeling. And not all imagination is pleasant; sometimes we have to imagine that which we fear most so that we can begin to overcome that which we find uncomfortable. Some ancient practices that help us process and get comfortable with the idea of dying involve imagining dying. Buddhism, for one, has many meditations that involve you imagining your own death or the death of your loved ones. So imagining isn’t just to make your dreams happen but imagining helps open us up to feeling the more uncomfortable experiences of living. Being able to imagine what we are moving towards, whether it is pleasant or not, helps protect our access to feeling. It keeps us from shutting out feeling and helps anchor us more deeply to feeling. Furthermore, being able to imagine protects us from falling into the trap of the confused perception that feeling hurts us. It is not feeling that hurts us; it is our rejection of feeling that does. Therefore, our imagination helps us ease into those feelings that we might reject. It helps us feel them but in the intensity we can handle. It helps us work up to experiencing the scary things in life in controlled doses so that we can ourselves gage and stretch and work up to that which we can handle without breaking, just like you would with weights at the gym. So I believe that imagination, in whatever form it takes, helps us to feel our feelings more fully, and thus our lives more deeply. It is through imagining and engaging in this creative act of envisioning that I believe we access our feeling of aliveness. It is through our imagination that we come to realise our power, our co-creative role in this life. For what is aliveness but to feel that the being who is inhaling is you. It is you that is expanding your lungs. It is you that is opening yourself up to life. It is you that is receiving it. It is you too who must let it go when the time comes. So feel it and don’t miss out on this wonderous experience. Feel the inhale, so you can too, feel the exhale.

As always with love and for peace, 

S.A.

On creating your own inner compass

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives, 

An important part of the process of growing is learning to listen to your own inner guidance. I believe it is one of our main responsibilities towards ourselves to discover what our voice sounds like. The ironic thing is that the first phase of our lives is about the complete opposite thing. We are first born and come into the world ready to be moulded and shaped by the voices of others. We arrive ready to be parented. First, we are like sponges that absorb all that is around us — language, culture, norms, values. We become a condensed version of everything that we have been exposed to. Then… Then comes adolescence when we start to feel the weight of everything we have absorbed. Some of us react by emptying the sponge of everything that it’s absorbed, rebelling against it. Some hold on tighter to the water in the sponge, thinking they are this water, they are these values they have absorbed, but the more they fill, the more water leaks out. Somewhere along the line, whether it’s through a quarter life crisis or any other one, we are all forced to expunge the water from the sponge. We find ourselves some place where gravity no longer exists and all of a sudden any drop of water that was inside the sponge separates and exits the sponge and starts to float all around us, not in one piece, but in its individual droplets. And all of a sudden, perhaps for the first time ever, we can see each individual value or belief that has interacted with us. We see what we thought we were made of and realise that these things are not us. There is an us separate from all of these beliefs. There is an us that can choose which beliefs to hold within it, which values to embody. But how does one decide which values to give shelter to? How does one decide anything really? Deciding, how we decide, our own decision making process — that too after all is a value. 

In a world that places greater value on rational thought than intuition, this becomes an important and pivotal value that arguably will shape all other values we choose. I would like to pause here for a moment on the word choose. Choose is not so different from decide, they are close cousins, synonyms. They both imply a will. They both imply a linear process from the subject making the choice to the object being chosen. What if, just what if, the relationship between chooser and what is chosen is not so linear, what if what is chosen chooses its chooser. It is possible. But it is only possible when we can acknowledge the limited way in which we perceive. Not dissimilar to our experience of time, it appears linear to us, it appears to be one-directional but it is not. And so it is with deciding and with choosing. Perhaps then the extra emphasis and value placed on rational thought comes from the assumption that we are always willing, that the flow of choice begins with us and our individual minds. But now that we have established that what is chosen can choose us as well, then perhaps we could start placing value on our listening abilities. How can we receive that signal from what is choosing us, how can we know that this thing has called for us? Is it through developing our intuitive abilities, valuing them, not belittling our natural signaling systems, giving all our systems a balanced distribution of power and importance? I really do believe we are collapsing under the weight of our minds for a reason, there is too much pressure on them. There is too much pressure on them to know, to decide, to choose. We have disconnected our minds from the wider systems of our bodies (both the physical and energetic bodies). And right now I am not calling for the opposite either, but I am calling to reintegrate our minds again back with our bodies, not only to relieve them of pressure but also so that we can receive better, so that we can flow better with life. So that we “choose” what is choosing us. 

Balance is not just an important feature of outcomes, but of processes too. Balance in how we choose, how we will, how we receive, balance in our perception of our control, our power and knowing that it is always both fate and will. We need to open our minds and our hearts to the truth that listening is a form of choosing. To extend your antennae, to reintegrate your body’s type of rationality with your mind’s, to know that they are just different types of rationality — that is balance. To have values, but to know at the same time that all values can help grow us or destroy us; to know that today one value can be “good” whilst simultaneously being “bad” for another in some other place or at some other time in history — that is balance. So that means when we choose, we need to consult with our whole self – mind, body and soul. Whether you call it an inner compass or a higher self, there is a part of us that knows, senses and feels what is right for us. I must also pause here to take a moment or two to speak about rightness.  Sadly, I think we are very confused about the ideas of right and wrong. We’ve been limiting them to these really rigid things. Right and wrong do exist. Right and wrong are necessary. But right and wrong, I believe, fall outside of morality. Rightness, I believe, is what is appropriate for our specific unique individual soul’s life experience. That means that to know what is right for us, we must learn through our own mistakes. And sometimes what is a mistake might be you choosing what other people would call “the morally correct way” and not doing the other thing that people would call “morally wrong”. We all have specific life lessons, life experiences and life journeys to go through and it isn’t just about us, it is about how each one of our life experiences enriches both the collective and individual experiences of all other living beings. What I mean is that sometimes poor people are not poor because they did something wrong or they chose it but poverty might’ve chosen them and Poverty with a capital P serves us all; it must exist because in its absence Life loses its balance. Without Poverty, Richness cannot exist. Without seeing poorer people than us, we eventually forget to be grateful. And it is not just poverty in resources I am speaking of here; there is poverty in joy, there is poverty in movement and poverty in sight. Without the blind, we forget how valuable our sight is to us. It is in seeing the other end of us, the opposites to us, that we can be who we choose and are chosen to be. And your life does not only serve You, it serves Us all. And not through how you think, but through every way you can be. So learn to listen deeply so you can recognise your own voice in the beautiful messed up crowd that is the entire world. Learn to receive what is for you and let go of what no longer speaks to you. Listen, so you can choose your chosen path and finally be who your whole system of being is yearning for you to be.

With love and always for peace, 

S.A.

p.s. I missed you. It’s been a while.

A Musing On Endings

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

There are few certainties in life, perhaps the most certain of them all is that we will die. More so than that is that all those who we love will die. Everything dies, be it a living being or our youth or a marriage or job — everything ends. Even the world as we know it, at least from our point of view, ends when we die. Endings therefore shape our lives and in turn how we relate, not only to ourselves, but to the whole world around us. And as many people as there are right now, there are just as many ways of relating to endings. Endings offer some people clarity, a clean finish without which they cannot grieve and move forward; whilst for others, endings bring them anxiety reminding them that with each breath, they themselves are ending. But on the back of every ending is a new beginning. On the back of death, life is born and so how can we truly love living without loving dying first. For me personally, learning to see the beauty in death has helped me see the beauty in life. I went through a period of intense death anxiety in my mid-twenties, and one of the things that helped me overcome this fear of death was taking photographs of dead things that would cross my path, be it a bird or an insect or a flower. Slowly, I began to see beauty, I began to notice the body, its fragility, its vulnerability, yet its power to shape the kind of life we experience. It is my unique body that allows me to experience life from my eyes. It is my body too that dies when my life in it ends. But what happens to my spirit, my soul, where does it go? In all those pictures I have taken, it was clear that these were just bodies, albeit beautiful bodies, but bodies without a soul, they were left behind for the earth to consume them because to whom does a body belong but to the mother body that holds us all. 

I remember my last term at university, I was so afraid all the time, not because I had exams coming up, but because I was graduating, my time in London was coming to an end, and I didn’t know what the future held for me. I was sad to leave friends behind. I was sad to leave a way of living I had gotten accustomed to behind. I was sad to say goodbye to a version of me that was dying. I would never again be an undergraduate. I would never again be 20. I would never again be so impressionable. No more blank canvases. I was all scribbled over now. I would never be new, not like seventeen year-old me. I would only grow older and older. The future —all of it — just seemed dreadful. Not that the past wasn’t difficult, but the future just seemed daunting instead of possible. I share this because I am sharing with you how endings made me feel, and still make me feel, although I must admit I am much more hopeful now than I ever was when I was eighteen. So maybe in losing youth, one gains hope or rather faith that it all works out in the end; even if we don’t arrive, we will survive. I can see clearly now how I navigate transitions — with loads and loads of fear. What I suppose is different now is that when I was younger, I used to believe the fear. Now, I just hear it out, nod a little to acknowledge it, but I certainly do not believe anything it has to tell me because I know most of the time, there is extreme exaggeration happening. So tens years on from my London goodbye, I am at the verge of another goodbye and so I wish now to meet this ending differently. I wish to be grateful to all the people, events, places — good and bad — that have held me over the past years. I would like to say thank you and offer a big smile right from the heart. I would like to say to the future that awaits me — to the beginning dawning on me — I am very excited to meet you. I would like to hope, instead of despair. I would like to let the possible pull me forward, instead of letting the impossible hold me back. I would like to move forward knowing that when I do look back, I will feel full with contentedness and gratitude — not because things were perfect but because they were a stop on my journey. When I wake up in fifty years time, and I hope I do, I want to wake up eager for another day and grateful for eighty years worth of days that I have said goodbye to. When my body dies in fifty eight years time, I hope that I can say goodbye to it and let go of my long small life. 

With love and always for peace,

S.A.

On being extra ordinary

Posted on by S.A.

Dear quarter lives,

Do you remember being asked as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you remember the answer you gave? Did it change as you grew up and realised the handyman that you wanted to be as a five year-old was not good enough for the world so at fifteen you decided a doctor was more suitable and then at eighteen you decided no a doctor isn’t enough, you need to be even more important than that. You didn’t want to be tucked away in a hospital saving lives quietly, you wanted to be seen for your accomplishments, recognised by the whole world for something great not because you were egotistical but because you needed greatness to give your life value. Not meaning. Value. It wasn’t about your life meaning anything, but it being worth something. And greatness is value. Greatness means you are worth it, it means all the mistakes you’ve done were worth it, it means your birth was worth it, the trouble you put your mother through to be born was worth it, the tremendous investment your parents poured into you was worth it. It means that the life you have lived was worth it. It means that when you come to die, you will feel like you were well spent.

But then your eighteen year-old self became a twenty-something old self, and you came to realise that greatness was not at all what you thought it was. Greatness wasn’t something the outside could give you. Greatness wasn’t accomplishing great things. Greatness wasn’t an object you could accumulate or collect. And as your twenty-something self approached your thirty year-old self, it dawned on you that greatness was in fact the complete opposite of anything your fifteen year-old self could’ve imagined. It dawns on you that greatness was never going to be found in the large things, but the very small ones. It dawns on you that greatness could never be achieved, earned, or accomplished but that it was a sort of being; a state one can access only from within. It dawns on you that you had completely misinterpreted what it meant to be extraordinary. It was right there in front of you but you just couldn’t see it. Extra ordinary. The most ordinary possible. And you realise how foolish you had been. How can something so obvious be hiding so well in such plain sight. Language indeed can be very crafty, but in its craftiness will manage to always keep it simple. And so it dawned on me that I could only become great through the ordinary. Through the everyday being, the everyday talking , the everyday loving as well as the everyday worrying, the everyday frustrations and the everyday resting at the end of it all. Being great is being really good at being ordinary. So this whole time, the only thing stopping me from being extra ordinary was my own resistance to ordinariness.

To pursue extraordinariness, I thought I needed to make a monster out of ordinariness. And I did. For so long, I had been so afraid of being ordinary. I was afraid of being swallowed, of being invisible, of not standing out, of getting lost in the crowd. And so as a result, I have exhausted my self pursuing a ghost. Now, I can finally rest, I can finally stop running, I can finally stop feeling so hungry for attention, for validation that I matter, that I am important, that I am worthy. Finally, I can see what I had been so blind to — the sheer freedom that ordinariness offered. All this time, I had attributed such confinement to ordinariness that I couldn’t see that it was in fact a liberation — a gift of being just so. I cannot say yet that I know ordinariness; I have yet to get acquainted and allow it to pulse through me. All these years of resisting must now become all these years of allowing, of giving permission to all that is ordinary within me to just be. And in doing so, I hope I can eventually get to a place where I am comfortable swimming in the greatness of my very extra ordinariness.

I recognise now that truly great people know they cannot accumulate any real power, because there is no power to be accumulated. Great people do not delude themselves they are powerful when they are in fact powerless in the face of time, nature and death. Great people are those who are aware of their nothingness and yet do not try to fill it up or mask it because they know nothing ever can. Greatness is knowing our power is not ours alone but all of Ours. Greatness is knowing that our personal strength comes from knowing we are a link, a chain, a connector, a communicator between all that is living and all that is dying. There is no person or being alive who was not born of someone. Our story never begins with us and neither will it end with us. So to recognise that even within our own story we might not be the main character but just a character — that, I believe, is greatness.

With love and always for peace,

Shahinda