Things I've Made a Priority

I lose track and get disoriented, at times, more often than I would like. But what keeps me tethered and, in no small measure, quite content is remembering there is behind it all a sacred intention that I carry with me through my life as it unfolds.

I realize I am somewhat unusual, but only when I catch my reflection in other people's eyes. You see, I don't think of myself as unusual. People ask. Or marvel - treat it like this little morsel of luck that I "get to do" things.

As though it were all one great big lottery, and us only scripted spectators.

Anyone who knows me here will know I take umbrage with that view of the world. It brings me pleasure, the knowledge every day that I have complete agency, that I have a great deal to say about how my life will unfold. For me, it is (and always has been) a priority - accountability. Ownership for the life that I am here creating. It's not always a very inviting place to be. I feel extremely tempted at times to just throw my hands up in the air, like many people, and pretend it's all just an accident of fate and that I am powerless.

I don't know about you, but I've never nurtured that kind of sickly fantasy.

I try, as I build my path, to only include things that make my soul shine. It's not possible 100% of the time. Someone's got to change the toilet roll or take out the trash. But for the most part, I would say I've done a pretty good job.

Of course, the thing that makes my heart thrum the most is writing. I try to write daily (and this place often helps). I use it to give voice to my dreams and nightmares. To explore the things I thought I'd buried, to build my own concept of reality and perhaps to, at times, share it. I write because it never occurred to me I could do anything else. Not once. And I recall, often, a conversation I had with someone on this platform off this platform, of things we wanted to do with our lives.

"You're lucky. You already know what you want to be."

Luck? I disputed it at the time and perhaps I still do. I feel it challenges the intentional aspect of living, the responsibility you have, that each of us have, to aim towards something that is good, something that can allow us to transcend and become better beings. For me, writing is that.

I have no doubt whatsoever I would be an infinitely worse person if I didn't write.

Lately, I've been prioritizing yoga, and with it, have come a small slew of other traits I delight in. It's helped me feeling strong, but also grounded. It allows me grace and fluidity which my soul feels by default while writing, but this has been a nice way to translate it into my body.

It's become a thing. Not recently, but I've only really started being aware of it over the past couple of years. I'm a worse person when I don't do yoga - I'm crankier, stiff (duh), frustrated, ready to blow. Not good.

Yogic practice has also helped me cultivate stillness and joy. It's done tremendous good in my relationship with my body and in soothing the nervous system. A couple of years ago, over summer, I couldn't conceive of doing yoga in such high heat. Now, I look at it more as a voluntary sweat.

Openness. People say 'travel' when listing their hobbies to the point where it's become a cliche. So I've been thinking what precisely about travel is it that I am enjoying, and I would say (other than the opportunity to present myself as a blank slate and get a little lighter with every step I go) it's the openness that comes with voyaging.

The big issue we seem to have with ennui is that we're only presented with things we assume we've seen before, so close our eyes voluntarily. Only when we're taken out of familiar habitat (via bus, plane, or helicopter ride), do our eyes open again.
I love new places. I'm getting on a plane once again in a few hours. But I'm also trying to cultivate this openness on a day to day basis.

Finally, I love to learn. I'm going to do a more complete post about PA soon, so won't get into that much, but more broadly speaking, there is such a vastness of things to know in this world. Books. Podcasts (non-AI ones, hopefully). Documentaries. YouTube projects. Online lectures. People. Just ordinary people.

If there is anything that regularly gives me anxiety, it's this abundance of things that you could know, of new things worth discovering. And my mind so small and limited, still, after a quarter of a century.

To me, that is tremendously exciting but nerve-wracking as well. There is so much. How do I choose? How do I make space for all?

I realize that for most people who've known me here for a while, none of what I said today is something new. See, I wrote this in response to the MINIMALIST's #KISS prompt of the week:

What makes your soul sing? And how do you prioritize doing things for inner happiness?

I realize I'm at a privileged point in my life. I am young. I don't have kids yet. And life has, in many ways, gone my way. But it seems to me this model of "life" as something of responsability, something of toil where we occasionally, half-guiltily manage to squeeze in an occasional "me time" to do something for us, should be stopped.

I've tried to build my life around the things that make my soul sing, rather than keep time for them in the margins and dog-marked corners of my existence. Which is why you hear about them often, and not occasionally. It's simply been a matter of priority for me, and the things that I have loved have not come easily, nor are they without their sacrifices.

It might not seem like it, but there is a cost to living "weird". To quote a much-loved play I've been meaning to rewatch lately,

"Everyone knows how weird I am."

This isn't about shirking responsibility or sacrifice. It is about meeting it head-on with awareness and openness, making sacrifice voluntary, rather than having it forced upon you. I am trying to build someone who is strong and resilient and can do such things, using the things that make my soul sing as building blocks. Parts that contribute to the still unrevealed wholeness of myself.

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Did my writing invite you to mull over the prompt? Then why not chime into the #KISS initiative that we're running over in The MINIMALIST yourself? :)