There are days where I get so caught up working, thinking and writing and designing, that I start to feel cross eyed from spending the entire day in my head and not in my body.
And I actually work for myself — I can't point a finger at anyone else but me. And yet I feel completely caged in the work life that is of my own creation.
So I book a flight, to break out of my own robotic rhythm and enter my creative body again.
It’s hard enough to navigate through life and all its emotions, challenges, losses and frustrations without having to also be the best version of you in your work, family, friendships and still manage to come out feeling accomplished, creative and free.
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Personal freedom is important to me.
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The liberty, as an individual, to determine what serves me best in my journey, that helps me encounter the challenges I'm ready for, overcome and learn from them, and still have time and energy to create something meaningful with my two hands, my heart, my mind and my own experiences. To actually have time to experience the world, to create, to love, to live, at my own pace, without having my time and energy monopolised by trying to stay alive and paying the bills.
It’s not a privilege many people on the planet have. But for some of those people, it is a privilege and joy waiting to be created. It is an aspiration just out of their reach because fear, society, and self-doubt get in the way, because we’re all human and all we want is to be loved, to belong, and to be meaningful.
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So how do you create it within the confines of your reality?
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For a lot of us, going to work day in and day out, at a job that pays us enough to afford any luxury we want when we finally get to choose what we want in our “free” time is like a painful anaesthetic. It keeps us just numb enough to experience life like a machine going through the same motions every day, while being unavoidably aware the entire time that there’s a life worth living out there, because we got to see it in our vacation. So we keep waiting for vacation, and retirement, to finally be free.
Then there are those people who seem to work little, play a lot, travel all the time, and still afford to go out to nice places and dress beautifully. And in all this time, you’re never really sure what they do to earn a living.
I've since discovered that to become one of those people, you don’t always do a job, because instead, you are always doing life. When you get yourself out into that big beautiful world, and experience it, you develop skills and experiences from living consciously, with purpose and joy, day in and day out instead of sitting behind a desk in a concrete box. You have to dare to see things and feel things that equip you to know things that you can’t know until you’ve 'been there'. You have to learn the inside jokes that only those in that exclusive and mysterious club seem to know about.
Here’s the thing: as humans, we aren’t just machines operating levers and executing programs indefinitely. We are bodies, full of thoughts, emotions, sensory experiences, intuition, faith, fear, exhilaration, and potential to grow and change indefinitely. We are organic. We are dynamic. We are alive. We are different now… and now… and now. Every passing moment, we are forever changed, and we will never be the self we were before.
And each one of us encounters all of this world through an entirely unique combination of senses and experiences.
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Is it any surprise that operating the same job day in & day out makes so many of us tired, restless and unfulfilled?
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This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a job. In fact, a job is a fabulous learning opportunity — just like every other human relationship. One that affords you a context within which to connect to others, to learn about yourself, your likes, your dislikes, your issues, your talents, how people react to you, how quickly you learn things, how slowly you forget things. A job is a chance to know yourself, and the more challenging it is, the faster you learn.
But when that learning curve flattens out, what happens then? We forget that we are in the job to learn and instead we stay too long just to keep earning a payload that we can blow off on escaping the reality we’ve created. So many people work so hard for their retirement, for their vacation, and without a doubt, they keep our world running.
But if you have begun to be awakened to the passion that lies dormant inside of you—the passion that some call faith in God, and others call the inner artist, and still others call the human instinct to create and nurture something in the world—you can no longer go on in this mechanical way of life. You won’t feel at ease until you step into your nature, and really connect to what’s within you.
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You won’t feel alive until you feel awakened.
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Because while our consciousness may sit in our heads, behind our eyes, our real conscience, or calling, is known in our hearts & gut, in the central core of our bodies. And this is the true engine of our lives, even if the pilot sits in the cockpit above.
And the fuel you consume will affect how your engine runs. What you eat, but also what you read, watch, learn, listen to, who you surround yourself with, they may enter your mind but ultimately, they are absorbed by your central engine in your core, and it’s only when your mind connects to that core that you can be in alignment with yourself, what you believe in, what your purpose is, and what your journey will be. How far and how fast you’ll go is all determined by your engine, even if your pilot will decide which route you’ll take to get there.
This here is the reason that every ancient philosophy of meditation and energy tells us to align ourselves, to look within, to activate the pathways between our minds and our core.
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We feel through our bodies. We experience the world through our physical senses. We drive with the energy that we fuel our engine with.
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When your mind becomes disconnected from your engine, you have to start all the way at the beginning to find that connection again, away from the demands and distractions of the modern world. In the silence of nature, your own nature awakens, and you face the reality of being made of the same material as the bird in the tree and the water in the creek. In the disengagement of your mind from information and questions, your pilot finally sits back to let your engine engage autopilot, giving him much needed rest.
Have you ever driven a car for too many hours at a stretch? It’s impossible to focus and make good decisions when your mind and your body become tired and saturated.
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When we eat, when we love, when we sleep, we connect to our nature, and to our very core: our gut, our heart, our body that senses everything around us to help us experience and navigate the world.
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And what you learn, what you experience first-hand, what you see with your own eyes and feel with your own heart, this can never be substituted with any virtual reality, any movie or book, any other human account. What you experience first hand is forever yours, and can never be taken away from you, even after your memory fades together with your eyesight.
Our grey cubicles are designed to numb us, to keep us focused on the task at hand, to keep us away from nature and from connecting to ourselves. We are blocked from real human contact by concrete walls and firewalls, and we are kept too busy in a hamster wheel to have any energy left to feel alive anymore.
And then we’re handed a pay check to apply on our tired souls like a balm that dampens the pain but doesn’t heal the injury… it only lasts long enough to give us hope, and bring us right back to that cubicle to feed the next glimpse of freedom.
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It’s not the job that’s numbing us. It’s our resistance to change, to having to try hard, to think & feel on our feet — quite literally, by getting up & moving.
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Our inner core seeks learning and experience and adventure. Challenge and creation drive us to overcome our limitations, and feel like we are winning. Today's growing startup landscape and yesterday's dotcom bubble are evidence of this zeal for uncharted territory and invention in the face of stagnation.
Yet so many can't leave the beaten track to wander into the unknown territory out there.
So why do we stay? Because we are afraid of not belonging, of not surviving, of not being loved, of failing ourselves and those around us. We are afraid of not being admired, of not being accepted, of not being like everyone else, because the way everyone else is feels safe.
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We are inherently afraid of being disconnected.
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This is our animal instinct, to stick close to the herd, waiting to be overcome by our human potential to choose freely and wander to another land and face whatever consequences we come across with bravery and perseverance.
What if our society rewarded such bravery? What if you got a huge gold medal when you quit your job and walked out to live your life without fear of hunger or homelessness?
What if you got a big certificate that said, Congratulations! You have learnt who you are, what your skills are, and how you interact with others, and now you can go and do anything you want?
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What if it was mandatory to leave your job after five years to go travel the world and contribute something meaningful to another community?
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What if it was normal that you go and spend a month alone in nature, foraging for food, and making friends with the birds and squirrels? What kind of communities would we live in then? Would we have more progress, or less? Would we be more connected to life or less? Would we be more respectful of the planet or less?
Would we appreciate how great we each are in our achievements, while being humbled by how little those achievements really mean in the big picture? Would we know what it means to live, to love, to be grateful?
That’s not the world we live in today, where we evaluate our worth by how many people liked our last post or how much startup capital we raised, waiting to be validated by our society to feel we are on the right path.
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But that world is out there, waiting for you, should you choose to go looking for it.
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And what you will learn when you exercise your personal freedom will nullify your need for material things, will teach you life skills that no one else has, and most of all, will give you a relationship that surpasses every other relationship you’ve ever had, whether that was a parent, a child, a lover, or a job: you will have an incredibly intimate relationship with yourself.
And your life will become a gift to yourself, full of people, of opportunities, of meaningful moments of happiness, grief, and real experiences.
No one can give it you this gift, it’s yours to take. And it's available to you in each and every passing moment of this thing called 'life'.
How will you seize your personal freedom and creativity in the next passing moment?
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