Everything worth doing is also usually hard.

You can watch this essay be read by me in video form, here.

I think about my life and and about humanity usually through the frame of stories. It’s just kind of how my brain works. What’s cool about stories is that they can have many different readings. They’re malleable. You can use them as a vehicle to hold a variety of different contradictory elements, because guess what? That’s what being a person is. Walking around being a lot of seemingly contradictory things.

Odysseus in some versions of the story is a hero, in others a monster. Maybe he is both. Maybe your perspective depends on if you were fighting with him on the beaches of Troy or fighting against him and deceived by his trickery.

My own parents were – in my eyes – superheroes when I was little, annoying when I was a teenager, disappointing as a young adult, then relatable once I left home and started to have more adult problems. That wasn’t because they suddenly became disappointing or relatable or annoying, but because my perspective kept shifting.

There is a hadith that says the Quran is revealed in sabʿat aḥruf — through seven different modes or readings of the text. Some traditions (like the Sufis) then took this and stretched that number to 70. What a beautiful idea. It’s an invitation, to expand beyond the confines of what you think you understand. How lightly can you hold your own ideas and assumptions? How much can you broaden your peripheral vision and let in ideas or concepts that are uncomfortable, foreign, challenging?

Maybe what I find beautiful about this is that it says so much more about the audience. The story is just the mirror. Your openness to the story decides how many different colors you see.

When someone asks me how I am doing, I often don’t know how to reply because I don’t know at what level I should be answering at. The truth is I might be doing great, terribly and also feel ambivalent all at the same time. Actually, I feel I’m usually juggling seemingly irreconcilable feelings.

And this is what I wish to write about. On a day to day or even hour by hour level there is always some kind of struggle, frustration or nagging thought. I couldn’t sleep last night because it was hot but I didn’t want to deal with the tiger mosquitoes which started showing up in droves a few days ago and are absolutely obsessed with my blood and don’t leave me the fuck alone. I deliberated for about 20 minutes from 4:10am to 4:30am, after which I opted to open the windows, and then I just didn’t fall back asleep, thinking about 600 other micro worries or passing ideas, so after a couple of hours I just got up and started writing this.

If I zoom out a bit, which I try to do as often as possible, these are obviously tiny problems. Written out like this, I would say it’s almost embarrassing except for the fact that I know everyone does this. There are no stakes in this story. I’m not gonna get malaria. If I got malaria, I’m not gonna die because I have access to healthcare. I’m not thinking about how I am going to eat today because all of my basic needs are met. I have fucking fiber internet. At this level, I may have a genuine moment of gratitude. Mostly I’m just trying to get my head out of my ass. Oh yeah I live a pretty cool life, I should remember that more often.

And sometimes if I zoom out more and go really big picture, when I close my eyes and I ask God how my life is going, I get a blazing sense of light. Things are not just “pretty good.” This life I am living is actually extraordinary. Not in any material or measurable sense. It has nothing to do with money, accomplishment or impact in the world. In fact I imagine it’s so resonant because it is independent of those markers. What an amazing gift to be alive and learn about myself. I just get this deep, deep sense that I am learning so much about how to access my heart and then how to move through the world with that heart access. It is profound. Again, this kind of radiant moment of perspective only happens sometimes, but when it does happen, it’s such a stunning and exquisite response that it’s disorienting and I’ll open my eyes and go what about the mosquitoes?

What I mean is I have a hard time squaring these different levels, these different registers, the different perspectives of my higher and lower self. I don’t think you can square all of these things, actually. I think that is the beauty of how life was designed, there are 70 different readings of what’s going on at all times.

I’m trying to expand my view to accept that I am all of these things. Delusional and clear-eyed. Petty and open-minded. Arrogant and sincere.

There is a kind of gravitational pull back towards the stupid little annoyances of everyday, the missed deadline or new 200 EUR fee I have to pay (what the fuck!) or something else because there is always something else.

It is within this conflict, deep in this mud, that we spend our lives.

Fortunately it would appear these are not original thoughts of mine. Actually, it seems like someone had this exact thought thousands of years ago. They must have been thinking how much daily human life is messy, like mud. Maybe they stared at some mud when they thought this. That’s a fun thought. Standing there contemplating the mud.

And what did they see? A lotus. Roots in the mud, stem through the water, and above the surface of the water, the blossom reaching out into the air and toward the sun. Somehow this beautiful flower is rooted in the muck.

In the words of the late Thich Nhat Hanh: “No mud, no lotus… most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”

So I guess the real work is becoming friends with the muck. It would seem you cannot skip the mud if you want to reach towards the sun.

I wrote this listening to this.

This video always absolutely kills me.

Seriously, what’s the point?

I am releasing a bonus essay on Saturday for paid subscribers.