It is strange to move from one view of the world to an entirely different one. Mostly because it requires me to change as well. I can’t remain the same person anymore. If I do, won’t I simply keep sustaining something that needs to die? I cannot ask the world to change if I am not willing to change myself.
There is a danger in this moment, that those who want to transform the world into something radically different – whether in economics, ecology, or the way we organize ourselves socially – do so mainly on an intellectual level. We think and talk endlessly about what it should look like, yet step into the new world as the same people we were before, marinated in the system we grew up inside.
Perhaps that is why so much change never moves beyond ideas. We try to create something new with the same reflexes, the same motivations, and the same understanding of value as before.
The person I used to be was always moving towards something. I lived by understanding what was about to happen before it fully arrived. I wanted to be first. To start things. To build. I thought bigger, faster, more. There was always a next step, and I lived inside that step.
Everything changes when that disappears. Not just what I think or believe, but the very feeling of who I am.
The person I was still exists somewhere as an echo, while another part of me is trying to realign the compass. The old self watches the new one and wants to speed things up. The new self is disappointed that the old one did not stop sooner.
It feels as though two parallel life stories are unfolding inside me at the same time. In one story, I was full of promise. I created new things, saw opportunities, built platforms, but ultimately became a failure because I burned out, lost my direction, and disappeared from several communities - and with them, the life I thought I was going to live.
In the other, softer story, I am someone who tirelessly searches for ways to do what feels right – for myself and for the world. Someone who keeps trying to survive in the only way I know how, but who no longer believes that more is always better.
“In reality, however, every ego, so far from
being a unity is in the highest degree a
manifold world, a constellated heaven, a
chaos of forms, of states and stages, of
inheritances and potentialities. It appears
to be a necessity as imperative as eating
and breathing for everyone to be forced to
regard this chaos as a unity and to speak
of his ego as though it were a one-fold and
clearly detached and fixed phenomenon.
Even the best of us share this delusion.”
– "The Steppenwolf" by Herman HesseThere is another insight here as well. That what went wrong – in the rhythm, the position, the relationships – may not only say something about me. It may also say something about a system that has become dependent on people constantly optimizing themselves.
The systems and environments I lived in were never a good fit for me because I am simply not built for that rhythm. But because I lived there, because I saw almost all of it, I can also stand where I stand today. With the strength to step away. With the conviction that another kind of life exists somewhere else. A life I catch glimpses of now and then, fragments that make me happy in a way that feels entirely new.
Peace. And a different kind of freedom. Call it awakening, age, or courage – I don’t know, and I don’t really care. I simply want to keep existing and become more of who I was meant to be.
I see more and more fragments of something else. Sunlight moving across the floor. Feelings. Words slowly emerging. I genuinely do not want to be anywhere other than here.
But who am I if I am no longer the person I built my life around being? When does a person stop being the same person? And how much must die for something else to live?
The world makes it difficult to let go. Everywhere there are traces of who I was. Versions of myself. The teenager I once was still exists in the eyes of old classmates on Facebook. My first business cards are tucked away in moving boxes. In the wardrobe hang suits I will probably never find a reason to wear again.
Keep or let go?
I don’t know. Perhaps it is the same question I am still asking about the person I used to be.
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