I stole part of this from somewhere... but the only thing that matters is what you walk away with.
This is the thing I keep coming back to... the first forces that threaten to take us out are not strangers. They are our own families and our friends. The people who are certain they already know us. They built a version of you when you were small and they need that version to stay put, because if it moves, something in them has to move too.
I have fought my whole life for my own mental sovereignty. Peace of mind. That fight has been the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than anything else in my existence by a wide margin. First figuring out who I actually was underneath everybody’s expectations. Then building legs strong enough to stand on. Then learning to stand there while the storms came, and they came, and they kept coming.
I could have easily ended up dead long before I figured any of it out. That is not a dramatic line, it is just true. The fact that I am sitting here now is close to a miracle.
Our darkest days and our worst tragedies turn out to be our greatest gifts. But only if we can capitalize on them.
That last part is the whole thing. The pain is not automatically a gift. It sits there as damage until you do the work to convert it.
I have always deeply adored Hesse’s work. My homeboy Hesse. And what still bothers me is the mystery of it... why do we have to go through so much pain and torment to get to the other side? I am still not sure whether it is an absolute prerequisite. It sure looks that way from here.
He was fifteen when he bought a revolver and walked into the woods. A religious family with a plan for him, schoolmasters with a plan for him, a pastor with a plan for him. Missionary, scholar, church leader. Everybody had a use for the boy and nobody had any interest in the person. He pulled the trigger and the gun jammed.
A mechanical failure. That is what stood between the world having Siddhartha and not having it.
And what did his family do with a sensitive, poetic kid who would not fit the mold? They put him in a clinic at Stetten. Treated his refusal as illness. He wrote to his father from inside those walls that the very people claiming to save his soul were the ones crushing it. Fifteen years old and he had already found the thing it takes most people a lifetime to see.
The world will come for the exact part of you that makes you worth anything, and it will call that removal help.
Then life kept hitting him. He lost a child. His first wife came apart. Depression, two world wars, the whole catalog. Every one of those went into the work. Not because suffering is noble, but because he refused to let it be wasted.
The line of his I hold onto:
Knowledge can be communicated but wisdom cannot.
You can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders with it, and still not hand it to anybody. Nobody could have told me any of what I know now. I had to walk it. That is the frustrating and beautiful part... every person has to make the walk themselves.
What actually saved him in the end was not a philosophy or an achievement. It was humor. Connection. Learning to stop taking the world’s unnecessary drama so seriously. He said he had to experience so much stupidity and so many vices and so much sorrow just to become a child again and start over.
That is the part I am still working on.
Standing your ground against everyone who tried to write your life for you is only half of it. The other half is not letting the fight turn you cold.
Being loved is a fine thing. Knowing how to love somebody is where the actual joy lives.
As above, so below
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