What is essential for you?
I asked this question at our Clarity Pages gathering last Tuesday. As I was writing for my 20 minutes journaling, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling of being overwhelmed. The online world has a feverish pace. Social media have many pathological aspects that add to the general restlessness. As a soulless, reckless, and relentless giant apparatus, they possess a great ability to manipulate, distort, and deceive. I realized I’ve been in a defensive mode most of the time while being online. I’ve been actively trying to avoid what’s constantly being thrown at me for years now—not what life throws at me, but what the media force on me to get as much of my attention, time, and energy as possible.
I remembered the exceptional allegory that Shelbie Ely, one of our fellow contributors, came up with for one of our retreats. In a bowl filled with water, initially still and undisturbed, the surface is occasionally rippled by rare water drops. They create beautiful concentric circles that extend and slowly dissolve. It’s very pleasant and calming to look at. Gradually, the drops increase in intensity and frequency. It reaches a point when the stream is uncontrolled, the surface is in an agitated state, and the water overflows.
Our balance is disrupted. Blocking the uncontrolled stream shouldn’t be considered a radical act, nor should normalizing the drops again. Knowing how not to be exposed to a disruptive stream system is an art worth learning because, as it turns out, high-quality harmony, peace, and calm in our inner landscape are essential.
How do you know if something is essential in your life?
During the conversation at the end of the journaling practice, another common observation emerged: it turns out, we know when something is essential because we feel it physically—in our throat, chest, and gut. It’s a physiological reaction.
We will die if our primary needs are not satisfied. We experience emotional and physical pain if someone we love rejects us. We feel sadness if we lose or never get something we consider of great value to us. We are angered if we experience injustice.And as I write this, a logical conclusion and question arise:
How much damage are we doing to ourselves with our attitude of intellectualizing our emotions and feelings?
Being open to observe and understand what our physiology has to communicate in a given context, without attempting to taper or silence its volume, is an essential.
But it’s also worth noting that being able to distinguish between what really matters and what is instead an abstinence crisis or craving futility is a much-needed skill. In these dopamine-dominated times, reclaiming our ability to make choices, set boundaries, and edit our lives again is an essential.