27/08/25 - I don't really know what to write about today, and that feels kinda bizarre to admit. I'm only 5 days into this evangelical crusade of sharing thoughts with the internet, and already I'm coming up stumps. Non bene. That said, it again highlights a particularly notable dipole, a polarity, a tension that I've long struggled with in many aspects of my life, and so I think it's a great premise to begin a post from. You can be the judge of that.
Ask my lil sister, my exes or anyone who knows me well, and they'll tell you, straight up, that it can oftentimes be very challenging to get me to shut up. I am a bundle of unbounded energy, often without sufficient constraints or guardrails to contain it and keep it moving in a straight line. A bull in a china shop, a wrecking ball as some might say. Oopsie! The irony of that contradiction is certainly not lost on me...
How can someone with so much to say, whose mind is so often racing at a million miles an hour, sometimes have nothing? Sit staring at the keys with a blank stare?
Internal Misalignments
Being Pulled in 5 Directions
Honestly, when I sat down to write today I could think of at least 5 things. The internal psychological palaces (that become prisons). The paradox of choice. Just the events of my day! The mind was racing with ideas. But then the heart and gut spoke up, and they said,
And I thought, why not explore that?
My mind, evidently, was thinking about impact. Scale. Ambition. Shadow drivers. "You've wrote for 4 days in a row, you can't miss the 5th one!" Why not? Who cares if I do? To be honest, at this stage in the 'journey' probably no-one at all.
My ego cared, clearly. The part of me that is thinking about 10 years in the future with glee at all the riches I could amass, all the fans. That's not service. That's not giving a gift.
The heart and the intuition, however, know that growth is happening in every fibre of my being right now. They are calm, even in the eye of the interstate move and redundancy storm, even in unemployment, even in constantly shifting priorities and geographic locations and financial positions. They are centred. Serene.
Sitting with the Feelings
Sitting with the feelings is something I have, for the majority of my life, been notoriously shit at. Like I'm talking about "RUN to anything and everything I can get my hands on that's easier than that" kind of territory.
28/08/25 - And do you know what, last night that changed. Yesterday I was exploring sitting with feelings instead of running from them, and for the first time in my conscious memory, I lived it. My system said ‘enough for today’ half way through the post, and I actually listened and put myself to bed instead of forcing it.
And this morning, when I came back to it, I got into a fresh flow only for my day to pull me into sitting in the sunshine to bask and watching a few friends fix up a camping trailer. Slowing down, the scariest thing in the world to me not so long ago, filled an eternity in an hour or two this afternoon.
Notice
Presence as Presents
It’s honestly quite concerning how much I’m enjoying being unemployed, aside from the obvious financial constraints. My time is entirely my own, I can pull on whatever threads I choose to and, most importantly, put things on pause and breathe without fear.
I had a conversation with a recruiter today, who’s actually lined up an interview for me tomorrow. The job looks really cool, as does the company! I said the above to him and he laughed - he told me that he was the same age as me, and he’d never had such a break in his entire career.
That appalled me. I felt for the guy! After leaving the Navy and my business development role in the UK, I moved to Thailand and ended up being there for 18 months, but even that hasn’t felt as refreshing on a soul level as this last month has. Even then, I was spinning my wheels and going nowhere, seeking productivity for productivity’s sake rather than ever stopping to smell the metaphorical roses.
Your presence is a present. Your peace is a conscious choice, and though the world doesn’t appear to prize it, your calm energy radiates outward and plays its small but integral part in healing the world.
What are we afraid of, if we were to stop pushing?
I thought it was for positive reasons that my mind spent so much of its energy on the future. Planning, strategising, calculating. It seemed productive, like having the next 20 steps figured out would make walking the path easier (NEWSFLASH: it doesn’t). There’s a degree to which this can help, but it can also lead to an almost-chronic anxiety, built mostly on an external locus of control.
We control what we control, and not a thing more. However us smart alecs think we CAN control far more than we do. I put the circles of control, influence and concern in a few posts ago - it's just as relevant here. We seek control because certainty gives us comfort, as biologically and societally we are programmed for uncertainty to induce fear.
On the surface, the fears are easily explainable through our logic:
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A missed opportunity and its consequences.
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Loss of momentum causing stagnation and struggle.
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Being forgotten, irrelevant or insignificant.
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Not achieving our hopes, goals, desires and dreams.
But there are deeper fears that lay beneath them, and they are often fears that go untouched for a lifetime, never seeing the light of day, never being aired, never even being acknowledged. So they trap us.
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We're only worthy if we're producing, achieving, succeeding.
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Stillness is no different to death, or meaninglessness.
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If we don't win, we don't matter.
What a lie that is. And what a loss that is. Because that fear can stop us from trying at all, and to me, that's ACTUAL failing.
Self-Discovery
What l've discovered in these past months of unemployment - of actually living the "enough for today" wisdom - is that the opposite is true. The more l've trusted my system's call to slow down, the more genuine flow has emerged. The more l've stopped trying to control steps 1-20, the clearer step 1 becomes.
The recruiter's shock at my contentment? That's how rare this is. Most of us are running so hard from the fear that we're not enough without constant achievement that we never discover what becomes available when we stop.
Your presence IS a present. Not just to yourself, but to everyone around you. When you're not frantically managing your image or chasing the next milestone, you become available for actual connection. Your calm energy becomes medicine in a world that's forgotten how to breathe.
I don't know what tomorrow's interview will bring. I don't know when the "perfect" opportunity will arrive, or if my writing will ever reach the scale my ego dreams about. But for the first time in my adult life, I know that's not what determines my worth.
What if the very thing we're afraid of - that moment of stillness where we're not producing anything - is exactly where our worthiness has been waiting all along?
What would change in your life if you trusted that truth?