Contact brings us home

Yesterday, I wrote that:

I’d love to pretend I’m reporting from a place of enlightened awareness, but the truth is that 90% of whatever wisdom you might find here was stumbled upon through crisis and catastrophe. I’m always trying something, and after a few decades, you get a definitive sense of what does not work.

When I was a teenager, I felt a pervasive sense of yearning for “something more.” The default story of status and success was already ringing hollow and I found myself drawn to figures like Carl Jung and traditions like Taoism.

In Jung, I came across the idea of a “divine spark”. For reasons I couldn’t explain, it seemed obvious to me that everyone would contain some part of the divine. But I didn’t know how to recognise that or share it with others.

In Taoism, I saw for the first time what it would be like to build a philosophy that embraced all aspects of life, from how to eat and move, to how to meditate and act wisely.

That led me to meditation. I thought I needed to find something esoteric and refined to honour these ideas, but instead, I discovered that sitting with my unadorned moment-to-moment experience could open up incredible depth and mystery.

Not long after these experiences, I began to feel incapable of expressing how this newfound wonder emerged during the rollercoasters of emotion and insight I’d traverse each week. And so I started journaling. By sitting with my thoughts and awkwardly trying to write them out, I began to see myself in high definition. What had seemed flat and simple gained depth and dynamism.

Much later in life, I experienced burnout whilst working as a technical founder of a company. I thought I needed to forge some new and more exotic path forward. But instead, I ended up writing about how hard the last 3 years had been. I shared these pieces publicly and it ignited a series of positive changes in my life.

In each of these examples, I felt some lack, some sense of alienation. I thought I needed to escape it by doing more or doing better.

But each time I was shown a way forward by increasing contact with what was already happening. Whether through cultivating presence, describing my inner world or sharing my experiences with others.

Contact didn’t mean resignation: each time I increased self-contact, it gave me a richer appreciation of where I was and a better vantage from which to act wisely.

Contact isn’t always light and pleasant, but it’s real. And when we recognise the real, we find ourselves in a world of beauty, purpose and wonder.

Contact brings us home to ourselves.