I had a simple goal for 2017: To write one post on this blog every week. Not the loftiest goal, I’ll admit. But to set a goal with no end in mind was a big deal for me personally. For the first time, I was taking a dig at this mysterious idea called the Journey.
Not quite like the Lord of Rings. More like getting past 52 levels of a video game. All I knew of the end was, after 52 weeks, I could go play a different game or start over.
It’s taken me three months to fully understand what that journey meant. I think I was looking for some sort of an epiphany when the journey simply exposed me to something I thought I always knew,
Myself.
Not the existential self. But the actual meaning of the word in a context. As in, what does it mean when someone says I do something for myself?
The bazillion authors who say, I write for myself. Or entrepreneurs who, after a crushing failure, say I worked those 18-hour days for myself. Or every artist who found the idea of myself so compelling, they let it engulf them in order to create something eternal.
In art and beyond, what does I do X for *myself* even mean? The answer was my lesson in Year numero uno of Blogging.
To do something for myself (yourself).
It means finding your passion by doing ordinary things passionately rather than looking for extraordinary things to do.
It means giving yourself away to something bigger and then choosing to be selfish.
It means breathing in the vacuum of solitude.
It means knowing the only thing that can heal you is the very thing that can break you.
It means stepping up to be the one gutted and smoked by unconditional love.
It means reducing motivation to a whisper of hope.
It means being ready to be cracked open without falling apart.
It means realizing everyone is trying.
It means looking back at the end and seeing you have created parts of your life that are larger than the sum of its parts.
Whoever you are, whatever you do, I hope that at some point in your life, instead of grabbing at everything in your way, you experience the feeling of doing something for yourself without fully understanding who you are.
Bon voyage.
Meditations 