Hey, this is going to be awkward and weird to read, but I’m trying my best to be honest about who I am and what I’m doing. So, if you’re interested in that, here ya go.
I want to learn, fundamentally, how to navigate this experience of conscious existence successfully. This is what I’m aiming toward, but it’s not clear to me in anything but the most general terms. I have a sense of what I’m aiming at, but it’s more of a feeling than anything else. Let me try and describe it a bit better.
When I was young, there was an odd sensation which used to come over me. It felt like a call from way out in the distance, like a pull toward a place beyond the horizon. It was never more distinct than that. It didn’t make itself known what it wanted of me. It just whispered for me to come find it, like it was hiding some beautiful secret I might be able to uncover.
What it asked was absurd: to let go of everything and just walk toward it. It wanted me to leave everything behind. All my relationships, all my possessions, all my comfort and safety, and head into the horizon. I wanted to be able to do that, but I couldn’t. I even tried and failed a couple of times. Eventually I stopped listening. I shut it out and closed myself off from it.
But it never stopped speaking. Even after all this time, the whisper remains.
I’m writing this as a way of attempting to walk that path again. A way of attempting to be of real service. That gets to the heart of what I want: to understand how we can truly help one another. It’s kind of like the “feed someone a fish vs teach them to fish” thing. You can give a person things to make life easier, but can you help them become more capable of living the life they desire? To me, that’s how you really help someone. You empower them. But that’s not just difficult, it may be one of the hardest things there is to do.
I know before I can realistically expect to help anyone else, I need to find a path of doing this for myself, first. To this end, I’m using myself as a test subject. I plan to share my experiments as well as what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully that means I can be useful even if all I do is fail. At least I can share my failures and maybe save you some time.
I know becoming a better person is not in the class of problems that can ever be solved in some final and complete way. It’s a process, not a destination. A journey toward, not a journey to. I think maybe it’s what I’ve been trying to figure out my whole life. It is inevitably foolish and ridiculous, but I am going to try and do this in public, because this is honestly what I want and I believe it’s far more likely to benefit others if I share my attempts.
I hope you find some value in it.