something far deeper than your surface. You are something far deeper than your identity. You are not a value that shifts on a stock market of external opinion. You are part of something bigger. You are part of life. You are part of all life. You are an expression of life as much as a dolphin or a lion is an expression of life. You are part of the whole as much as you are an individual. If your individualism manifests itself at the cost of your connection to the whole, you might stumble, but you always have the chance of reconnection. Because life is the way to reconnect with life. And you are alive.
One
Numbers are addictive, because they enable us to measure and compare and quantify while also making us feel there could always be more. And numbers—and comparisons—are everywhere. Social media followers. Body measurements. Income brackets. Age. Weight. Online rankings. Click counts. Unit sales. Likes. Shares. Step counts. Sleep counts. Word counts. Test scores. House prices. Budget reports. Stock market valuations. Numbers, numbers, numbers. And the numbers get in. They make us compare. We compare to other people and we compare to ourselves. We don’t necessarily do it in a negative way. We might want the best for other people. For our friends and our family. But far too often numbers are involved. I think the numbers get to us. Every value is numerical. We become finite and measurable and of variable value. We lose our sense of infinity. Of life itself. Where numbers exist, measurements exist. And measurements limit us. Because measurements take us from an infinite perspective into a finite perspective. Only finite things can be measured, after all.
One (two)
If you truly feel part of a bigger picture, if you can see yourself in other people and nature, if this you becomes something bigger than the individual you, then you never truly depart the world when you die. You exist as long as life exists. Because the life you feel inside you is part of the same life force that exists in every living thing.
Power
The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.
Growing pains
When everything goes well, we tend not to grow. Because to grow we need to change, because growth is change. It is generally when we face hard times that we evolve. Often we need to fail in order to learn, just as a bodybuilder needs weight to resist against. It is impossible to grow in a world without struggle.
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
How to look a demon in the eye
It’s easy to want to run away from bad feelings. When we feel sadness or fear we greet them as problems to be instantly solved or dismissed. I can remember that when I was first in the middle of a deep depression, I wasn’t just feeling depressed. I was feeling depressed about feeling depressed. Anxious about feeling anxious. And so, inevitably, the negative feelings kept on multiplying themselves.
The key to recovery lay in acceptance. This was the paradox. To escape depression I had to get to a point where I accepted it. To stop having panic attacks I had to get to a point where I almost invited them. I would feel that sudden heightened alertness symptomatic of panic, and I would say to myself I want this. This is not a strategy you should necessarily follow. And I certainly don’t mean to belittle the horror of a full-blown panic attack. I know as well as anyone how utterly terrifying it can be to feel trapped in your own mind when it is in total freefall. But after a hundred or so panic attacks I realized something about them. They were self-referential. They fueled themselves. I mean: the panic became worse because I was panicking about the panic. It is a rolling snowball of its own making. But if I stopped myself being frozen about the panic, if I melted into a state of acceptance, the panic snowball ended up running out of the ice-cold terror and couldn’t grow. Eventually it would float right through. My mind would watch the panic rather than fight it. A totally different type of engagement.
Sometimes, situation permitting, rather than trying to ignore the panic or walk it off, I would just lie down