good atlas

I carry with me a bright orange notebook. In it are phrases and paragraphs I have read from elsewhere that I jot down word for word as lessons, reminders, remedies. 

Words to live by, as they say. Words that I have dog-eared to death. Words that offer a single-serving-salving answer to my incessant question about life — How? just how? do I live more meaningfully in this chaotic, capitalist world?

Page by page,

1. Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
2. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you are feeling deeply. 
3. Take the time to define what success means to you. So you don’t find yourself winning a game you don’t want to be playing in the first place. 
4. Cultivate honesty about who you really intend to be, the kinds of meaning you truly wish to enact in your world.
5. Ambition takes willpower— a constant application of energy to stay on perceived bearing. 
6. A little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.
7. Life is not happening to you. It is responding to you.
8. Experiment with what feels like mediocrity.
9. At the end of the day, it really is the people that matters that matter. 
10. How to sleep better: No phones, no devices.

—

There’s this thing on social media that has been shared a lot. A guy with a mic interviews people at the tail end of their life about what it means to live a meaningful one. 

He asks: What do you think was important back then but becomes less important as you grow older?

You kind of know the answer before the person answers. 

But you want to hear it again so it validates what you know is true in your heart; true in most of modern humanity. 

And yet, your heart aches a little. From longing. You are living through the questions, eager to flourish towards the truth that resides in the soft animal of your body. You already know your answer to these questions— and that is your calling, but are you heeding it?

I am not quite there, yet. These truisms about life are merely words in a bright orange notebook, but oftentimes and otherwise dormant, in the embodiment of my actions. 

And they are most certainly very difficult to do because the doing is not a singular deed. It is a dedication in practice. An embodiment and enactment of the values you honestly and relentlessly believe in, but runs counters to a world that has wired us all to live so unsustainably, to prize and prioritise progress over the health of our bodies and our land. To benchmark ourselves against material wealth that to have less is to be less than.

To dismantle it all— from acknowledging the historical and systemic injustices that has primed our world into a profit-extraction one and how it undeniably permeates the lived reality of every human being, and how me, one person connected to many others, will have to unlearn my own assumptions, biases and ego, and productivity-driven way of living, and to build from somewhere, a new voice of calm and confidence— is a lot of work to do. 

And this is the work that will go unrecognised and uncelebrated by everyone but ourselves and a few of those who understands and will support us. It is a lot of work to do that it is truly uncomfortable to know that we do not have as many templates and guides and processes to this ‘living meaningfully thing’ than we do for career growth hacks, investment hacks, weight loss hacks, beauty hacks and all of the things that flood our feeds. It is a lot of work to do and yet, we don’t do it as much because it’s not as easy as a hack. It is about living through the questions themselves, and to chisel away the noise to get to the core of the calling, and then…stay on course.

It will have to start somewhere and it will have to start small and softly, but surely it has to be done.

In my story, line by line, practice by practice.