First it’s the nerve-wrecking anxiety of reaching 29 and then 39 crept up quite suddenly and now that I am there it feels like the goal posts just keep moving. There is a restlessness to the extreme passing of time as though you can’t capture it. Time is inexplicably linked to death. It is all we have and a constant reminder of what we don’t have. 

Today marks the beginning of the rest of our lives. Today marks the day I wanted it to always be. This is the day. The last day.

I have replayed this over in my countless, heedless times. I have thought of the ending so much that I forgot that the beginning was imminent. That was my obsession with endings. I knew something, anything was coming next. For good or for worse. Holding onto the ending gave a fake sense of control like we control the ending, but it was just prolonging the beginning – the true destination.

Change is constant was the one main lesson from my 20s. In my 30s it became it is what it is. In my 40s it is currently people do what they want to do.

The big lesson is that they tell you to be yourself. They don’t encourage you to follow a purpose and be guided by your gut feelings. Instead, they tell you to become your best self when you don’t really know who you are without a purpose or by not trusting what you feel. If something doesn’t feel good – it most likely isn’t. If people don’t push you to find a purpose- you will live life in a heedless manner without a concrete destination in sight. 

Without the submission to God, I wonder how people find light. Being led and misled by the relentless whispers around our mind feels very transitory without relief.

Waiting to write or be in a state of peace once all things align is an illusion. They don’t align outwardly but inwardly. The peace is within you once you stop seeking it from outside. Then something magically happens, and you start seeing the world how you see yourself. The contentment from realizing that it’s within your control provides the ultimate relief. Suddenly there is no obsession with alignment or destination. The journey of sitting within that peace is enough.

I have always wanted to start. I always continue to want to start. I start. I stop. I start again. I stop. For over a decade now. Now, I have started, and it will flow, I tell myself. Yet the persistent, little voice keeps repeating “who cares about what you have to say.” But there’s that yearning to come back. To always come back and I wonder why that is.

But another, more powerful voice has shown up recently basically saying the simple fact that I am writing the book I have wanted to read.  Everyone has a story in them they say, here is mine. 

You do not belong anywhere. This whole global thing – I was born here, parents are originally this, and I live here now – is a manifestation of your displacement. The world is not yours. Where is your place in it?

I initially started writing as a habit when I was in my teens. I developed a love of poetry, but I never continued it because I always felt it was not time yet to really write. I was deluding myself. When would be a good time? My attitude should have been that there is always time but that’s the whole point – there is not enough time.