It's a Tuesday morning, the first back in the "office", after a weekend sleeping on the ground and walking through the alpine. I've got a dry nose, peeling forehead, sore legs, bruised hips. Despite the sensation of my body seemingly falling apart, it's been a while since I've felt this alive.
With every step we took over our 14-mile journey, I could feel a burning thing rising under my ribs, a purging. My relationships, my business, art, and desires. They were all on emotional trial as I tried to project my discomfort on them as we walked. Maybe that doesn't make sense. Or maybe, if you've been there, it does.
As the creature comforts and ease of daily life cracks and falls away when you're in an uncomfortable situation -- one you can't readily escape -- it's impossible to avoid the truths you know in your gut but haven't yet processed in your mind.
It's been a second since I felt that 'ripped open' sensation. The one you can't numb, you can't avoid. I was tired and I was "feeling things" as my friend Skye said. I was emotional. I was not my 'best' self by society's standards. But I was incredibly human, and that's something.
Two days felt like two years. That's what contrast does.
In the routine of a privileged, comfortable daily life, time passes quickly. But I never want to gloss over time, having a week, month, year, feel like a just glance down and up again.
Routine creates an inner resin. It takes me away from that raw, ripped open place where I feel deeply, where my most true expressions of art and life come from.
Prioritize your expansion -- the breaking and shaking off of your inner resin.
When you feel brave enough, or perhaps ignorant enough to the discomfort you will endure, you do this by putting yourself in new and challenging situations.
I do it by travel, which wakes me up to the world. I do it by falling in love. I do it by saying 'yes' and agreeing to go, when my physical body wants only to stay.
You can't avoid time. You can't avoid this expanding universe. It's going on with or without you. Choose to be an active part of your expansion. It will be hard, it will be beautiful.
