For the last ten years I've only really thought about two things: my academic studies and my career — in that order.
I spent six years, back-to-back (without a gap year) in higher education. Two years of A-Levels to get into University. Three years of my BA to get into a Masters program. One year of my MSc. These are just meaningless stats to you but when I hear them, I think about all the times when I locked myself in a room for nine hours straight glued to a desk on the verge of tears, the coffee-induced all-nighters I had to pull, missing countless social events, revising for an exam on my birthday and New Year's Eve — all that jazz.
Apart from two relationships that I had during that period, I pretty much put my entire personal life on hold. It was kind of convenient to operate as an emotionally void person because I had so much to do and I always thought of feelings as something that disrupts and intervenes with your life.
Naturally, my career has followed a similar course to my academic studies. Working overtime just to win favour with my boss, missing countless social events, locking myself in a room for nine hours straight glued to a desk, working on my birthday — it's as though I transferred the previous template I had used to survive the pressure of higher education onto my career in order to survive the equally, if not more, pressurised office environments where hyper-capitalism reigns supreme.
It's not that I looked down on mindfulness literature, but rather I was so busy striving towards my goals that the mere thought of taking sustained periods of time off to gather myself, self-reflect and examine the levels of emotional nourishment available in my life just seemed ludicrous. I only ever read non-fiction titles and would giggle internally any time I walked past a self-help section in a bookstore.
Yesterday, I looked at some of the books piled on my desk and I realised how different my life is now.
This is absurd to say in the grand scheme of things, but I have learnt more about life from 'The Courage to be Disliked' by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi than I did from the 50+ history and politics books that I read in my twenties. Alan de Botton has given my life more meaning than Howard Zinn, Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ever did.
And to think that I used to regard a deep intimate inquiry like introspection as time-wasting when in fact there is nothing more vapid than living an unexamined life purely for the sake of making it in the ever so aptly titled 'rat race'.
My life is so different today, in the ways that matter.
I envisioned that adulthood would bring with it a deeper sense of relentless goal-hunting and that I would want even more to be a triumphant capitalist, but it is quite the opposite. I want nothing more than to have my own family. I want nothing more than to be internally well. I want nothing more than to bask in silence, to feel tranquillity as it oozes through every ounce of my body and to examine who I am on a daily basis to ensure that I'm never falling off my own self-defined moral track.
Alan de Botton writes in Relationships:
"In order to survive the world, we have little option but to spend our lives being rather defended, closed off from certain emotions, focused - in many cases - on not feeling. Yet, in relationships, quite the opposite is required. To be good at love means to have a capacity to reveal one's hurt, desire and tenderness, to know how to be dependent. It's quite the balancing act and it should be no wonder if the journey from independence to vulnerability can get rather fraught".
Thanks to 'self-help' writers like de Botton, it's now more important for me to rationally disentangle the semi-conscious factors governing my life than it is for me to read the latest copy of The Economist (although I love to do that too). Henceforth, let 2023 be known as the year I finally said 'fuck it'.
A couple of weeks I go gave up my cushy life and flat in Hampstead to move to Spain for three months. I've done something of a similar nature to this before in my early twenties but the last risk I took in adulthood was taking a gummy bear out of the Pick'n Mix station at the cinema and not paying for it. Seriously.. routine has a way of making you complacent and complacency has a way of making you feel even more adult and I needed a 'fuck it' moment. The first cold shower I took after I paid for the apartment in Spain felt made me feel like I could explode with endorphin-filled joy. I was later skipping down the street.
I go for walks down a beautiful pathway near my apartment and every time I see the soft tinge of amber peaking over the clouds during sunset, I am reminded that all of life is lived at the edge of your comfort zone. It's not some Oprah-inspired cheesy line that deserves to be framed on a wall next to 'Live, Laugh, Love' — I really mean it. I have felt more alive in these last three weeks than I have done in the last three years. Lemonade tastes better in Spain. The wind feels more gentle on my face. I wake up in a state of awe about how life can both frighten and enrich you simultaneously.
It's worth it — doing that thing you don't want to do because you're scared it'll take your comfort away when you know deep down that comfort is stagnancy dressed up as certainty. You should always be putting yourself in situations where more of you can be unlocked, situations that require you to be a more heightened version of yourself and it just so happens that these types of processes are uncomfortable and they do scare you. As Dylan Thomas writes:
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light".
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